What's Good About ADW’s Pull-Down Lists? 16.6 Has a Few New Enhancements!

The 16.6 Allegro Design Workbench (ADW) release now provides the ability to customize the pull-down list values for part property editing. Some classification properties require “freeform” values (tolerance, voltage, etc.) and other properties only accept certain values, for example:
“YES/NO”
“COMPLIANT/NON-COMPLIANT”

This feature allows you to specify a set of allowable values for a property.  The allowable values will appear in a pull-down list.  This eliminates human error and promotes consistency and quality in the library.

Read on for more details…

In the ADW DBEditor, select File > Manage Part Classifications. For each property for which you'd like to enable pre-defined values, select the … field in the Pre-Defined Value column:

 

Select the “…” button next to an attribute (as an example, we’ll use the attribute – “ROHS”). ADW looks through the database for this Classification and retrieves all existing values. Add a new pull-down value, “NON-COMPLIANT”, by typing it into the text field and hitting enter:

 

Select the Save icon on the Toolbar.  This will create a new rev of the classification.  Because there are parts using that classification, it will bring up the following dialog:

 


Select “Preserve”.  You will see a dialog showing that each part using that classification is being updated. Next you will be asked to enter a comment in the check-in log.  Do so and select “Apply to All”:

 


Select “Close”.

You have just constructed a set of pull-down values that can be selected for the ROHS property in that classification… look at the “predefined” field of the ROHS property to confirm:

 

As an optional step you could mark the old Classification Obsolete so the Librarians don’t see both Classifications:

 

Open the ADW System Console and type lib_dist. If you don’t run lib_dist, then you will not be able to Obsolete the old classification because there are still parts linked to it:

 

Select Capacitors Fixed [1.0] and select Obsolete with the right mouse button. Select Yes when you see the following dialog:

 

Search for Capacitors Fixed. Sort Search results. Select CDN-CAP-0001 (as an example):

 

Checkout. Select Capacitors Fixed Classification. The ROHS Property should now have a Pulldown as shown below:

 


Select NON-COMPLIANT from the newly created pull-down list. Save, Check in. Add comment, select OK. Select Release and run lib_dist on the ADW System Console:

 



I’m looking forward to your feedback using this new capability.

Jerry “GenPart” Grzenia