Virtuoso schematic set net to default to a certain color

Chris,

It's not entirely clear to me what you're asking for. Are you asking to probe a net via the navigator? Or are you asking to actually change the colour of the wire on the schematic? The colour of a wire on the schematic can be edited via the edit properties form, the property assistant (so you could use the navigator), or using the F3 key to bring up the options form when creating the wire in the first place. Colouring wires that way doesn't know anything about how they are connected though - it's just for cosmetic benefits. The probing mechanism does however trace the net throughout the hierarchy and apply a consistent (temporary) colour to the probed net.

Andrew.

Chris,

It's not entirely clear to me what you're asking for. Are you asking to probe a net via the navigator? Or are you asking to actually change the colour of the wire on the schematic? The colour of a wire on the schematic can be edited via the edit properties form, the property assistant (so you could use the navigator), or using the F3 key to bring up the options form when creating the wire in the first place. Colouring wires that way doesn't know anything about how they are connected though - it's just for cosmetic benefits. The probing mechanism does however trace the net throughout the hierarchy and apply a consistent (temporary) colour to the probed net.

Andrew.

Hi Andrew

Thanks - sorry for the confusing question.  The property editor way to change the color makes sense, I've been using the default color then changing the wire by selecting the net and bulk changing the color. I was wondering if there's a way to set a default color for a specific net, like if I could assign a default color of red to the net named "clear" or something like that.  I think what I'm asking for is if there's a way to automatgically change the color of nets after I wire them up to specific colors based on the nets without going through the properties for the nets individually and rechanging them.

I hope that clarifies the question I'm trying to ask?

Thanks

Chris,

There's nothing built-in to do that. It could be implemented as a piece of SKILL that you could either call on demand or maybe as part of a "post check" trigger (with a bit of care). It's sort of like what SKILL function & environment variables to change wire Color and Line Style in Virtuoso Schematic Editor is doing, but that's for a given net name and colour. 

I don't have time at the moment to write some code to do this - there are a lot of questions that I'd be uncertain about if I was writing this - such as whether it should remove the colour if the net is later renamed to something different to one of the "registered" names, whether buses should use the same colour regardless of the bit that is in use. If I was to write something like this I'd want to make it general purpose enough to ensure that it solves lots of cases reasonably. It would also need a bit of care when implemented as a post-check trigger (using schRegPostCheckTrigger) as it would need to ensure that the connectivity didn't get outdated by setting the colours on the wires; you couldn't do it in schRegPreCheckTrigger because you'd want the connectivity there so that the wires had nets associated with them,

Andrew