Releasing Altium Designer Preferences to an Altium Vault
Contents
Parent article: Configuration Data Items
Altium's Design Data Management System caters for the ability to formally release your Altium Designer Preferences into a target Item (and revision thereof) in a target Altium Vault. Once the preferences set has been released, and its lifecycle state set to a level that the organization views as ready for use at the design level, the preferences can be reused across installations of the software.
A released preferences set is used as a configuration data item in one or more defined Environment Configurations. An environment configuration is used to constrain a designer's Altium Designer working environment to only use company-ratified design elements. Environment configurations are defined and stored within the Team Configuration Center - a service provided through an appropriately licensed Altium Vault installation, and the facilitator of this concept of Environment Configuration Management.
The following sections look at the process of releasing preferences into a target vault, so that they can be reused in further installations of Altium Designer, under the enforcement of applicable environment configurations.
Prerequisites
Access to the control for releasing your Altium Designer Preferences to your organization's Altium Vault requires the following:
- Your organization must have installed an Altium Vault – see Altium Vault.
- Enterprise-level Server and Client Access licensing for the Altium Vault must be purchased, and present in the vault's installation, in order to access the Team Configuration Center (provided as a service through the Altium Vault platform).
Once licensed, restart Altium Designer (if it was previously running). Once the application starts, sign in to the Altium Vault using the DXP » Sign in Altium Vault command. The Connecting to Altium Vault dialog will appear. Simply enter the server address (computername:portnumber) and your user credentials for accessing the vault.
To be able to release your Altium Designer Preferences to a vault, you need to be part of the Administrators
role – defined as part of the Altium Vault's user management. Once signed in to the vault you will be presented with a list of environment configurations that are applicable to your role. Ignore these, and instead enable the option to Work as administrator.
Crafting the Preferences
A defined set of preferences on the design side is mapped to an Altium Designer Preferences Item in an Altium Vault. Each release of the preferences set stores the data into a new revision of that Item.
Simply use Altium Designer's Preferences dialog (DXP » Preferences) to configure the preferences for the software as required.
Define your preferences as required in the Preferences dialog, ready for release to your Altium Vault.
You can now proceed to release the preferences set. To do so requires the following steps:
- Link the preferences set to the required revision of a target Item in a target Altium Vault. The Item must be of type
altium-designer-preferences
, and the revision in which to release the preferences data must be in thePlanned
state. - Release the preferences set into that targeted Item-Revision.
Linking the Preferences to a Vault
Before any preferences data can be added to a vault, there must be an Item defined in the vault to 'hold' that data. The Item is created before releasing the preferences set into the vault.
The first step is to link the preferences to the vault. Do this by clicking the Release to Vault button at the bottom of the Preferences dialog. The Link Preferences to Vault Item dialog will appear.
Controls for linking the design side preferences to an Altium Designer Preferences Item in a target vault.
Clicking the Choose button to the right of the Item Revision field will give access to the Choose Item dialog – essentially a trimmed incarnation of the Vaults panel. The field at the top-left of the dialog indicates which vault you are currently exploring. To select a different vault, click the icon to the left of the vault name (or on the vault name itself) to access a menu of top-level vault management controls. This menu displays all vaults that you currently have an active connection to.
With the required target vault active, you can either drill down through its folder hierarchy to select the required existing Item, or create the folder and/or Item as required, on-the-fly. Ensure that the Item-Revision chosen – which will receive the released preferences data – is in the Planned state.
Manually linking the source preferences to a planned revision of an Altium Designer Preferences Item, in the target vault.
Folder Type
Whether you have created an Altium Designer Preferences Item in the target vault beforehand, or are creating it in situ at the time of preference linking, you will need to first create the folder in which that Item will reside. As part of folder creation, the folder's type can be specified. This has no bearing on the content of the folder – releasing preferences will always result in Altium Designer Preferences Items. It simply provides a visual 'clue' as to what is stored in a folder and can be beneficial when browsing a vault for particular content. To nominate a folder's use as a container for Altium Designer Preferences Items, set its Folder Type as altium-preferences-catalog
.
Specifying the folder type - its intended use - provides visual indication of the content contained within that folder while browsing the vault.
Item Naming Scheme
Another important aspect of the parent folder is the Item Naming Scheme employed for it. This defines the format of the unique ID for each Item created in that particular folder. Several default example schemes are available, utilizing the short-form code for either the folder type or the content type. Using a default naming scheme, the software will automatically assign the next available unique ID, based on that scheme, having scanned the entire vault and identifiers of existing Items. This can be a great time-saver when manually creating Altium Designer Preferences Items prior to release.
A custom scheme can also be defined for a folder, simply by typing it within the field, ensuring that the variable portion is enclosed in curly braces (e.g. ADPREFS-001-{C000}
).
The Item Naming Scheme of the parent folder is applied to the Unique ID for each Item
created within that folder.
Item Lifecycle Definition and Revision Naming
When defining the Altium Designer Preferences Item, to which the source preferences set is linked, be sure to specify the type of lifecycle management to be used for the Item, and the naming scheme employed for its revisions, respectively.
Specify the required schemes in the Item Properties dialog, using the Lifecycle Definition and Revision Naming Scheme fields respectively.
Selecting the Lifecycle Definition and Revision Naming schemes for a manually created Item.
Verifying the Link is Established
Once the required revision of the Altium Designer Preferences Item in the target vault is chosen, clicking OK in the Choose Item dialog will create the link between source preferences and target Item. Evidence of the link can be seen back in the Link Preferences to Vault Item dialog.
Evidence that the design-side preferences are now linked to an Item in the vault.
Performing the Release
With the link to the target vault and Item-Revision in place, the process of releasing the preferences into the vault can proceed. Simply click OK in the Link Preferences to Vault Item dialog. The Release preferences dialog will appear. Use this dialog to determine which preferences to include in the release. A separate entry is available for each of the pages in the Preferences dialog. By default, all preferences are included for release. Simply enable/disable the associated Release option for a page as required.
Specify which pages of preferences are to be included in the release.
With the desired preferences for release specified, click Yes to continue. The release process will proceed with a confirmation dialog appearing at its completion.
Confirmation of successful release can be made by browsing to the target Item in the Vaults panel.
Browsing the released Altium Designer Preferences Item in the vault, using the Vaults panel.
The released data stored in the vault consists of all preferences in their entirety. This includes an .ini
file for each released page of preferences, as viewed and defined in the Preferences dialog, as well as the following application data files:
ADVPCB.dft
– provided the PCB Editor – Defaults page is released.Sch_DefPrimitives.dft
– provided the Schematic – Default Primitives page is released.Sch_DefPrimitives.MMsdft
– provided the Schematic – Default Primitives page is released.DXP.rcs
UserTools.tlt
– provided the System – Desktop Layouts page is released.
With the preferences released, they can now be reused as the working preferences as part of a defined environment configuration. For more information, see Reusing a Managed Altium Designer Preferences Item.
Re-Releasing the Preferences
Re-releasing the preferences – to take into account any modifications – is a straightforward process. And to streamline things, a vault administrator has the ability to quickly load a preferences set that has already been released into a vault - especially useful when needing to make a few minor tweaks:
- From the Preferences dialog, click the Load from Vault button. In the Choose Item dialog that appears, select the required revision of the Altium Designer Preferences Item to use as a basis for modification, and click OK.
- Make the changes to the preferences as required.
- Create a new
Planned
revision for the target Altium Designer Preferences Item. This can be done from the Lifecycle view for the Item, in the Vaults panel, or from the detailed view for the Item. - From the Preferences dialog, click the Release to Vault button to access the Link Preferences to Vault Item dialog.
- Choose the new Item Revision and click OK to release the new preferences data to that revision, specifying which preferences to include in the new release from the Release preferences dialog.