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  3. Find and Replace is horrible (17.2). Is there a way to Find...

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Find and Replace is horrible (17.2). Is there a way to Find/Replace prefix or suffix of nets, ports, offsheets, etc??

briwei
briwei over 4 years ago

I’m just trying to do a find/replace to update a bunch of Hierarchical Port prefixes from “Px” to “P0”. I would love to be able to do this for other cases like net names, like where a data bus has a similar naming scheme. So far, I've found the tools utterly lacking in any way to accomplish this very simple task. 

The Edit>Find (CTRL+F, or binocular icon) functionality allows for regular expressions and wildcards, and also allows for the narrowing of search scope to certain objects (ports, nets, parts, etc.) as well as narrowing scope from the entire project to only a particular selection. This is good! Unfortunately, there is no ability to actually replace what's found! 

I've also tried the Edit>Global Replace functionality. This allows narrowing of search scope, but doesn't allow wildcards or regex, making it impossible to find anything other than entire strings! 

Additionally, I've tried Tools>Utiilites>Find and Replace Text, which seems to bring up a TCL/TK script GUI, which almost does what I need. It allows a narrowing of scope to particular objects, but not to a particular selection or schematic page. This might be usable, if I was able to then select the items I wanted to change, effectively narrowing the scope manually form the list of found objects, but this TCL/TK GUI doesn't allow that. Furthermore, the GUI has some kind of bug in it that erases the "Report" output, which forces the user to close and reopen if they want to do a new search. 

Last, I tried using the Tools>Export Properties functionality. I was able to narrow the scope to the schematic page I need, and to the Hierarchical Port objects. I was also able to open the file in a text editor and use the wonderfully functional Find/Replace tools there to make the changes I needed. The only problem was that the import back to OrCAD failed (ERROR(ORCAP-1704): (Line 81) Line has more fields than previous HEADER line). I even tried importing a totally fresh, untouched export and it failed in the same way. To be fair, this particular bug may be some issue with a part in my design causing the import to raise an exception, so it's possible this route is still a viable option, but it's still rather tedious and ripe for errors given the amount of data being exported/imported in each go. 

I'm just at a total loss as to what to say about this. This broke my brain, guys. It's 2021 and a computer application that costs as much as Cadence doesn't have a Find/Replace tool? Unreal. 

Please help. 

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  • redwire
    redwire over 4 years ago

    Once you do the initial find and the results window shows up, have you selected the items and right-moused on them then selected "Edit Properties"?  That should open up a pseudo spreadsheet which allows editing of most properties.  That's been in OrCAD for 25+ years.  That spreadsheet still honors the old DOS copy/paste keystrokes which are sometimes the only way to get things to copy paste correctly unfortunately.  Also, you can select a header column and copy the entire column (or columns) into Excel or your favorite editor, change it using some smart replace rules, then paste it back using the *exact* same copy region you started with... or you might find some interesting results.  Hope that helps

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