Design Insight

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Design projects have quickly become complicated, involving a large number of varied design documents each with potentially massive amounts of data. Faster, easier and more intuitive project navigation available with Design Insight. Design Insight provides a number of exciting features to help you navigate at the project, document and even connectivity level, allowing automatic preview without having to physically open multiple sheets.

Design Insight consists of:

Project Insight

Project Insight, part of Design Insight allows you to preview all of the documents and navigate to a particular document in your project with ease. Hover over the Project icon in the Projects Panel to gain insight into the documents in your project. Navigate to a document by clicking on it in the preview. Project Insight displays both Schematic and PCB documents.

Gain insight into the documents in your project by hovering over the Project icon in the Projects Panel.

If there are a large number of documents in your project, left and right arrows become active in your preview, use these to navigate through your project files.

Documents appear in Project Insight in the order they were added to the Project. To view the order files were added, enable Show document position in project in the Projects Panel page in your Preferences dialog. A number will appear next to your document in the Projects Panel.


Connectivity Insight

Connectivity Insight, part of Design Insight, is interactive with the added benefit of displaying connectivity at a highly-visual, project level. Hover over a Sheet Symbol to see a preview of the child sheet as shown below. This document preview is available prior to compiling your project.


Compile your project to establish and view the connective relationship between net objects.. After compilation, hover over a net object to gain insight into the connectivity of that net object across your whole project. Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Double Click on any net object to show Connectivity Insight on demand.

Connectivity Insight shows the active document displayed in preview mode, with the net information displayed as a hint. The selected net is highlighted with all other objects masked. If the net object is connected to nets on other documents, these documents will be displayed with respect to your project hierarchy, with the selected net highlighted for ease of navigation.

Connectivity Insight in action - the active document is displayed with the selected net highlighted Connectivity Insight is available for any net object such as a port, sheet entry, bus, power port, component or harness objects. For Sheet Symbols, it will show the child sheet. For components, it will show all of the pins connected to that component. If the component is a multi-part component, all of the parts for that component will be displayed.

Navigate to a document by clicking on the document name in the list. The masking is maintained until you click in the document.

In your Design Insight Preferences (DXP»Preferences»System - Design Insight), you can disable and enable Alt+Double Click and the Hover style independently, choose whether to display hints, document preview or both and you can even control the time delay for popping up hover invoked Connectivity Insight.

Document Insight

Previews of your documents are shown from both the Projects Panel and the Documents Bar. Click on the preview to open your document.

Document Insight, part of Design Insight, provides an alternative way to preview and open your documents. Hover over the document icon in either the Projects panel or the Documents Bar to see a preview and relative file path for your individual documents. Once you have located the file you want to open or make active, click on the preview. The selected document will open in the main design window.

Document Insight is available for Schematic, PCB, OpenBus and all text documents including Annotation Files, Harness Definition Files and so on.
You can also determine the full path to your project and project documents by hovering over the Project Name or individual document names for their respective full path. The full path preview is available for all documents in your project including Schematic documents, PCB documents, OutJob files, Netlists, Libraries and Device Sheets.

Preview the full path to your project file or your project documents by hovering over the project name or the document name in the Projects Panel.

Preferences to control the whether or not Document Insight is displayed can be accessed through the Design Insight page of your Preferences dialog (DXP»Preferences»System).

See Also

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