Creating new attributes and sub-attributes

 You cannot create new attributes. The set of attributes is fixed by Cadence. You can create new user defined properties (and hierarchical user-defined properties) and also user-defined groups. Properties are good for storing values, and you can store integers, floats, strings, datestamps, and SKILL Lists (where the lists are lists of integers, floats, strings or other lists). Groups are good for storing relationships between database objects (because a database object or list of database objects cannot be stored as a user-defined property).

Whilst they don't show up in the ~>? output directly, they are easily accessible:

dbCreateHierProp(cv "MyNewAtt")
db:0x16e2f2c7
cv~>MyNewAtt~>MySubAtt=5
5
cv~>MyNewAtt~>MySubAtt2="hello"
"hello"
cv~>MyNewAtt~>value~>name
("MySubAtt" "MySubAtt2")
cv~>MyNewAtt~>MySubAtt2
"hello"
cv~>prop~>name
("expansionData" "MyNewAtt" "spectre" "schGeometryLastUpdated" "connectivityLastUpdated"
    "instance#" "pin#" "net#" "schXtrVersion" "lastSchematicExtraction"
    "schGeometryVersion" "spectreS" "viewNameList" "lastDesignExtraction" "cdsSpice"
)

Regards,

Andrew.

Thanks, very clear.
I didn’t expect it was possible to write on non-existing properties:
Cv~>MyNewProperty~>NonYetExistingProperty = ‘’YouWillExistSoonThough”
-so, good to know.
Feels like I am improving my SKILLs

Regards,
lkphoto

 Actually, I gave a closer look and I still have a problem:

In the example above “MyNewAtt” is a single property, while I would like it to be a list of elements having themselves properties.
The example of “shapes” and “points” fits pretty well:

If I type:
cv~>shapes
I can get MANY objects, not only one.

And if I type:
cv~>shapes~>points
I get a list of points for EACH shape.

Unfortunately, I do not find a way of doing same using the function dbCreateHierProp.
What I am trying to do, is defining new types of ports. Each ports, has some properties, for example a center and a width.
Each cellview Cv has multiple ports.

I tried:

    defstruct( Port center width  )    
    dbCreateHierProp(Cv "Ports")
    Port1 = make_Port( ?center list(1.0 1.0) ?width 1.0 )
    Port2 = make_Port( ?center list(2.0 2.0) ?width 2.0 )
    Ports = list(Port1 Port2)    
    Cv~>Ports = Ports ; defining the property to be the list of structures (appears working OK)
    ; Testing:
    Ports~>?                      ; works fine.
    nth(0 Ports)~>point0      ; works fine.    
    Cv~>Ports~>center        ; but this fails.
 
Any idea?
I could not find any way of using groups either.

Many thanks in advance,
lkphoto

 You are trying to store the contents of SKILL defstruct instance as a property on the cellView. This does not work as you cannot assign the value which is probably a memory pointer to the SKILL defstruct to a property.

You may want to store the data in a list of DPLs or assoc lists so it can be written to the database.

Ted

lkphoto said:

Unfortunately, I do not find a way of doing same using the function dbCreateHierProp.
What I am trying to do, is defining new types of ports. Each ports, has some properties, for example a center and a width.
Each cellview Cv has multiple ports.

You can't. As I said, you can't create attributes and new object types - you can use the existing props, hierProps and groups to store the information, but you can't directly use SKILL data structures (as Ted said) to store info like this. You could use those SKILL data structures in memory, but then store them as SKILL lists if you want to permanently store them on disk.

Regards,

Andrew.