PCB Editor and "find"

I have used this fillin confirmer box functionality in the past to gather information from the user.   I was able to easily generate an alias to allow you to use <Ctrl> + F to find components.  Each one of the commands below can be typed on the Allegro command line individually and I simply combined them into one alias mapped to <Ctrl> + F, here is what the alias looks like:

alias ~F "prepopup ; pop dyn_option_select 'Selection set@:@Clear all selections' ; prompt 'Enter Ref Des' ; refdes $prompt ; zoom selection"

The first command prepopup ; pop dyn_option_select 'Selection set@:@Clear all selections' clears all other selections so you center on one element instead of several.

The second command prompt 'Enter Ref Des' opens a fillin confirmer box so you can enter the Ref Des you are trying to find.

The third command refdes $prompt selects the Ref Des entered in the previous step in the design.

The forth command zoom selection will zoom and center on the Ref Des

You can add the Alias line above to your Allegro env file which is located in your PCBENV Folder so it will always be available during every Allegro session.  This may give you what you are looking for the short term and maybe Cadence can productize a solution in the tool out of the box.

I attached a Text Document with the exact alias syntax in case the formatting get messed up after posting.

Great Thread!

Hope this helps,
Mike Catrambone
Plexus Engineering Solutions

Tom to disable World View go to the toolbar and select View > Window, un-check what you dont need

Thanks Scott

Good job Mike this is very useful but.... (sorry there is always one of these), When I set this up in pcbenv and restart PCB Editor the CTRL + F doesn't work the first time I get E prompt Variable nor defined but If I do it again it works..... and secondly the clear all selections doesn't appear to work, I can find say C1 then CTRL + F again and C1 is still selected.... Maybe Cadence can add this to the new release (but fixed).......

Nice job Mike, but the Clear All Selections isn't working for me either.  I tried recording the script of clearing all selections and the syntax looks correct; but it's not working.

Hey Mike thats cool alias will get us there for now, but I agree that Cadence needs to fix this as it is not a good out of the box solution.

I did a slight variation using a macro script to produce what I needed, seems to work well. I assigned the macro to a hot key "F" in my case and it seems to be ok.

 # Allegro script To find and pan/zoom to a component

generaledit
prepopup 765.6 -211.6
pop dyn_option_select 'Super filter@:@Symbol Pin'
prepopup 750.2 -237.7
pop dyn_option_select 'Super filter@:@Off'
setwindow form.find
FORM find find_by_name 
setwindow pcb

# 

 At the top of my .env file I have the command

funckey f replay find.scr <cr>

Thanks Scott