DATA Pulse: Speed up ECAD Part Search in Allegro System Capture

16 Dec 2019 • 2 minute read

You're a designer working on an Allegro System Capture project and you clicked on Place – Add Component some time back, but here's what you've been staring at for a while:

You're seeing this because when you clicked Place - Add Component, System Capture automatically started indexing the libraries to speed up future part searches. If you have very large, non-Allegro EDM managed libraries, it can take a while to complete the indexing.

Admins, do your designers often search for parts when creating Allegro System Capture projects? Yes. Do they work with large ECAD libraries? Yes. Do you work with Allegro EDM Library Manager? No. Well, in that case, you could improve your end users’ experience in two ways:

Work with EDM Library Manager, which already manages all the library data in an indexed format (which means another index isn’t needed). But what if you don't want to do this?
Easy. Use a centrally indexed database (DB). With a centrally indexed DB, any time you create a System Capture project, this central data is accessed and used to quickly look for parts. Cool, right? No need to keep creating the library index for each new project, and it saves time. Now that you're convinced, let's move on.

How do you create the indexed database?

Here’s an example of a central index path:
START_COMPBROWSER
central_index_path 'D:/central_indexed_db'
END_COMPBROWSER

You added/removed libraries. What do you now do?

If you add or remove libraries by manually editing $CDS_SITE/cdssetup/cds.lib or through the user interface (Edit – Project Preferences), you'll need to re-index the database by running indexer.bat again. You can simplify your life by configuring this task as a Cron job (so that all changes are automatically and periodically re-indexed) or manually run indexer.bat whenever your libraries are updated. The updated indexed data is automatically available in part searches in System Capture designs.

What about memory?

Does System Capture need a lot of memory to load the indexed database? Hmm…it depends.

Scenario	Memory Consumption
System Capture with CENTRAL_INDEX_PATH	Low
System Capture indexes customer libraries for each project on each designer’s machine	Increases with library size
Not the case here, but… System Capture with CENTRAL_INDEX_PATH + Allegro EDM server	Low In fact, because System Capture fetches only required data from the EDM server and the designer's machine has no library data loaded on it, this consumes the least memory.

So, there you go…happy and faster searching!