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CIS - Multiple symbols per library or single symbol per library

I admit, I do have an Altium background but I'm trying to figure out how CIS exactly works. I figured that it is very similar to Altium's DbLib feature, in fact, they seems pretty much the same.

I'd like to know what the preferred way to handle schematic symbols is. I have seen that for Allegro PCB it is one footprint per file with the footprint name being the filename without the dra extension. This is also how we did it with Altium. For schematic symbols, I have seen that basically all symbols are stored in a single library file (or some number between 1 and 10) but not one symbol per library file (olb). Back then, we kept one symbol per file to nicely integrate with version control systems. It was always possible to determine when a symbol had been changed (and if).

I am not quite sure yet, how schematic libraries are being found. I found a reference to [Part Library Directories] which contains the location of our 3 library files. Does Orcad browse these libraries? How does that perform for .. say .. 1000 files with one symbol each?

If that is unfeasible, is there another way how to best integrate libraries into a version control system?

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0 drobny over 4 years ago

Put the full path to the symbol in the database..
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

Thank you for the insight. Can you give an example for that? What do you mean by "full path"?
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0 drobny over 4 years ago in reply to thomasli

If you have several symbols with the same name in different libraries, Orcad will use the first found symbol.

It is better to use the full path to the symbol in the database, Orcad will use it from that location.

for exaple

If you want to track changes in libraries and individual symbols, export the symbol from the library to xml.

Then it is easier to see the changes. You can do this with the TCL and OLB2XML commands and vice versa XML2OLB.
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

Thanks, that is great help. The OLB2XML would have been my next question :-)
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

drobny: I've been trying to locate the OLB2XML and XML2OLB commands but was unable to find them. I was able to create an XML via the File -> Export menu option. Are you aware of a possibility to extract metadata (symbol name, default reference designator, ...) from an OLB file from the command line?
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

drobny: I've been trying to locate the OLB2XML and XML2OLB commands but was unable to find them. I was able to create an XML via the File -> Export menu option. Are you aware of a possibility to extract metadata (symbol name, default reference designator, ...) from an OLB file from the command line?
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0 drobny over 4 years ago in reply to thomasli

Mea culpa! The right command is XMATIC_OLB2XML etc. Method of the xmatic class.

The command should be entered in the OrCada window or selected from the File -> Export menu

It is possible to run this command from the Windows command line, but not directly... If you want, I can write a console application for you..
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

drobny Thank you for the offer which I happily accept. Is there some resource which outlines how to run arbitrary scripts from the command line somewhere? Do those need to be run through some tcl/tk interpreter?
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0 drobny over 4 years ago in reply to thomasli

What version of a software you have installed - 17.4 or 16.6 ?

Application Notes -> c:\Cadence\SPB_17.4\tools\capture\tclscripts\OrCAD_Capture_TclTk_Extensions.pdf
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0 thomasli over 4 years ago in reply to drobny

I'm on 17.4.

I think I may have used the wrong meaning of command line: What I meant was to run some kind of TCL interpreter/script from the DOS command line, without opening OrCad Capture. The idea is to read all library files and check if certain values are consistent. The further idea would be to run this automatically each night and then come up with a list of things which are not ok in the next morning. I'd like to get some structure into our libraries.
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