Cadence Doc Assistant at Your Service

The OrCAD X and Allegro X 23.1 release comes with a brand-new content delivery application called Cadence Doc Assistant, shortened to Doc Assistant, the next-gen app for content searching, navigation, and presentation.

Doc Assistant, with its simplified content classification and standardized content smoothens the content discovery process to ensure that you get the help you seek with minimal effort and maximum speed and accuracy. This post describes the changes in Doc Assistant that you need to know as a new Cadence user or someone moving from CadenceHelp.

 New Home Page

The first change you’ll notice is that Doc Assistant starts with a home page that uses tiles as a navigation tool. Each tile is intuitively labeled to help you identify the type of content it houses.

Here is a short description of the tiles available on the Home Page.

Cloud-Based and Scalable

Doc Assistant is designed with the philosophy that the content you see is not limited by the installation and the latest and most complete documentation is always available to you. The risk of referring to the stale content in your local installation and the need for additional disk space and related maintenance is eliminated. While Doc Assistant can read the locally available content on your system, it can just as seamlessly load the content available on the Cadence content servers with minimal impact on response time. All you need is an active internet connection, and you always see the latest content.

Online, Every Time

By default, when Doc Assistant starts, it reads the content from the content servers. We call this the online mode. You can sign in using your corporate account and OTP-based authentication. Though optional, this step saves your search history and content access information across machines.

When online, you can even see the content from the other versions available on the content servers. When offline, compatible release numbers show up under releases, and you can switch the current release as needed. You can bookmark content and see a record of your past views in History.

 Offline Content Access 

While online is the new normal, there might be times when the internet is not accessible. To support this, Doc Assistant has controls to load the content from the local installation.

To switch Doc Assistant to the offline mode, click the Settings icon, and turn off View Documentation Online.

When offline, if any local content changes, due to an update for example, you must update the index for the search functionality to work correctly. This applies only to the offline mode. When online, the content displayed is always the latest.

Restrict Content to Selected Products

By default, Doc Assistant shows content for all the products installed or available in a release. Often, we work on specific products and when looking for information, the results from other products seem irrelevant. You can choose filters for specific products for which you want the content to be displayed. Click My Products on the home page and pick the products of your choice.

 Search Behavior 

A search bar is available on the home page and in the tabs that open when you click any tile. As you enter a search string, suggested alternative text is presented.

Meaningful text suggestions are prescribed for common typos.

You can control the level of matching for each search operation using Advanced Search Options.

The search results are grouped into tabs based on where they are found. And each entry appears with an icon that denotes its content type.

Filtering Options

Often, multiple search results are returned for a given search string. Or, when you click a tile on the home page, many results come up. You can filter the results based on the product, document type, and even the product feature, where available. This helps to quickly narrow down to the content that you require.

Here is a short clip of how search and filtering work in Doc Assistant.

For more information on Doc Assistant, watch this video on YouTube.

Contact us if you have any specific questions or suggestions for our content or Doc Assistant. We’ll be back with more information on other new features.

Watch this space.

Allegro Release Team