Get 'enabled' state of cellview counter

Paul,

There no SKILL function to determine the current status of the cellView counter. In general though disabling it is not something that any code should do for an extended portion of code - it should disable it just for the specific modifications you need.

There's also no public way to create an in-memory only scratch cellView. There have been some requests for this, but there's no SKILL support for doing this.

Regards,

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

I am very interested about the in-memory scratch cellview and the way to disable the cellview counter during a modification

For a specific function I am currently developing, I need to tile shapes into rectangles
I know abe can do it using a tile iterator but I haven't figured how to tile my shapes horizontally instead of vertically...

For now I am using the following solution:
How can I do horizontal slicing using leSlice and horizontal tiling using dbLayerTile SKILL function

But this implies to create the tiles and then delete them afterwards which marks the view as edited 

How could I do it without affecting the edited status of the view and the 'undo / redo' history?

Cheers,

Aurélien

Hi Aurélien,

First of all, you could use the abeLayerMergeTiles(layer "horizontal") function to do horizontal slicing - I think that's what you want.

Anyway, other than that, you could simply use:

unwindProtect(
  {
    dbDisableCellViewCounter(cv)
    ; here is where you would make your changes to the cellView that result in changes and presumably delete the temporary shapes afterwards
  }
  dbEnableCellViewCounter(cv)
)

That's the only public way of doing this right now. Given that any code should take care itself of enabling/disabling the counter, and this should be used with caution, the above is a pretty safe way of doing this.

Andrew

Ok, thanks for the "public" way of doing

I actually created a wrap macro to write unwindProtect expressions in a more pythonic way

(my_wrap_macro (dbDisableCellViewCounter cv) (dbEnableCellViewCounter cv)
  ;; Safely executed expressions
  ...)

> expandMacro '(my_wrap_macro in out body)
(progn in (unwindProtect (progn body) out))

This is just syntactic sugar but I find it more readable to have the start expression right next to the close one
Using this I rarely forget to close open ports, cellviews etc.

I was not aware of the existence of abeLayerMergeTiles but I have tested it and it solve all my issues

It's another discussion but the last thing ABE lacks is the possibility to fetch hierarchical shapes of provided instances (or selection) for a given layer

I wrote a code browsing recursively the instances and concatening the transforms while adding the shapes to an ABE layer using abeLayerOrPtArray but I am not sure how robust and fast this will be in bigger hierarchies

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help, it is always accurate and consise which is much appreciated

Have a nice day,

Aurélien

AurelBuche said:

It's another discussion but the last thing ABE lacks is the possibility to fetch hierarchical shapes of provided instances (or selection) for a given layer

There is abeLayerFromShapes, but that's only useful for level-0 shapes, so not really what you want. Probably worth contacting support to request an enhancement to get flat shapes from the hierarchy given a list of instances, instances+shapes, and a layer name.

Andrew

AurelBuche said:

It's another discussion but the last thing ABE lacks is the possibility to fetch hierarchical shapes of provided instances (or selection) for a given layer

There is abeLayerFromShapes, but that's only useful for level-0 shapes, so not really what you want. Probably worth contacting support to request an enhancement to get flat shapes from the hierarchy given a list of instances, instances+shapes, and a layer name.

Andrew