Tip for Linking AMIQ’s DVT to the Specman Docs

Since posting an introductory article and demo on AMIQ’s “DVT” integrated development environment (IDE), AMIQ has seen a spike in interest in the tool (yeah!)  Given the particular interest being shown by Specmaniacs, AMIQ has forward us the the following tech tip about how you can point to Specman’s HTML docs, AND how you can search through the docs from inside DVT itself.  (Recall that DVT is free to try – go to AMIQ’s site for details.)

If you have stand-alone Specman installed, all you have to do is configure the path to the documentation from the DVT menu [Window] > [Preferences] > [Help] > CDN eLRM:

Besides browsing the Specman documentation in the Eclipse integrated help:

you can directly select code in the editor and press <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<H> to find matching topics in the documentation:

Of course, you can type anything in the search text-box and locate your relevant topics.

BONUS:
You can also use DVT to scan the Specman/IES-XL output and automatically create hyperlinks to source code from errors, warnings, etc.  From the main DVT menu, execute [Run] > [Run Configurations], create a new Generic launch configuration, give it a name, then specify the launch command and work directory:

Next, while still in the Run Configurations dialog box, click on the [Filters] tab and turn on the Specman and other relevant filters as shown in the following example:

When finished selecting filters, click the [Run] button in the lower right hand side.  As shown below, output is then dumped to the console and patterns matching the filters (customizable BTW) are turned into hyperlinks to source code (both for compilation errors and run-time dut errors, assertions etc.)

Note that once you have configured a run, you can easily access it from the main window’s [Run] drop-down menu.

There’s more:
If you just want to load some code in Specman to detect some semantic errors, there is a quicker way:  right click on a file (top/test file typically) and chose [Run As] > [Load in Specman] as shown below:

Happy Coding!

Team Specman and AMIQ