BoardSurfers: Training Insights: Creating Custom Reports using ‘Extract’

You must deal with many reports in your daily life – for your health, financial accounts, credit, your child’s academic records, and the count goes on. Ever noticed that these reports contain many details, most of which you don’t want to look at?

For example, I was once going through my annual credit report to check my credit score and the tax I paid in the previous year. It took me 10-15 minutes to find the relevant details, I kid you not. No, not because I am a slow reader but because there was just so much extra information in the report. I don’t want to know about your firm in detail, just show me my area of interest!

In this fast-paced world, we only want to see relevant details but gleaning them from a detailed report can be a tedious task. In Allegro® Layout Editors, the Reports dialog lists all the out-of-the-box report types, but I have good news for PCB designers. You can also easily create Custom Reports using the Extract and Reports commands and limit the number of details in the report. Heave a sigh of relief, because who wants to put in the effort to find the relevant details!

By using the Extract command, you can pull data out of your design and generate an ASCII (.txt) file. You can use this ASCII file with the reports command to customize the report file for the information you want to view.

You can define as many Custom Reports as you want, save them to disk (with a .txt extension, of course), and use them in your current design or reuse them in any design by pointing the textpath variable to the directory where you have saved the .txt file.

I hope that this helps you define and generate clear and concise reports that will save you a lot of time. So, start using Custom Reports in your designs. And, you can utilize the saved time to meet the deadlines of other important projects.

To learn more about this feature, watch the Creating a Custom Report using Extract and the Report command within the Allegro PCB Editor video on the Cadence Support portal. Click the video link now or visit Cadence Support and search for this video under Video Library.

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