Merging shapes non-interactively

 Hi Tom,

Although I have already answered this for you via a Service Request, I will answer this here for the benefit of others.

The leMergeShapes command can be used in a non-graphical fashion, here is what I did to test this. First I created the cellview "leMerge" in library "test" and then created some overlapping shapes. I interactively tried the command and then reverted to the previously saved version and closed the cellview. Then I performed the commands non-graphically:

;; open the cellview in virtual memory, non-graphically
cv = dbOpenCellViewByType("test" "leMerge" "layout" "maskLayout" "a")
=>  db:243736620
;; perform the merge command on all of the shapes
leMergeShapes(cv~>shapes)
=>  (db:243736828)

You might want to only merge certain shapes rather than all of them, in which case it would be useful to apply a pre-filter, for example to merge only the shapes on the metal1 layer:

leMergeShapes(
  ;; take the first (hopefully the only) result from 'setof'
  car(
    ;; filter through the layer-purpose pairs to find the "metal1"
    ;; layer - here I'm assuming only one purpose is used, but the
    ;; purpose can be matched explicitly also by adding to the
    ;; condition:  && purpose=="drawing"
    setof(lp cv~>lpps lp~>layerName=="metal1")
  )~>shapes
)

Best regards,

Lawrence.

Hi Tom,

I've also found that sometimes it's better to use dbLayerOr() (with a single list of layers) to merge the shapes, and then discard the originals - in some trials I did a while ago, this had better performance than leMergeShapes with a large number of shapes.

I used this approach in solution 11328674 

Best Regards,

Andrew.