Project Document Previews

Parent article: Project Management

You are no doubt aware of Altium Designer's support for graphically previewing single design documents, or all design documents in a particular project – with the ability to open a document in the design workspace, simply by clicking on its preview. This well-established functionality is provided through the Document Insight and Project Insight features of the Design Insight System. These are enabled through controls available on the System – Design Insight page of the Preferences dialog.

However, hovering over individual documents to access previews can be quite laborious, especially if the names of design documents are of a cryptic nature, and therefore not helpful in 'zeroing-in' on the document required. And while Project Insight quickly yields a pop-up display previewing all design documents, it only displays the source documents. It does not present additional project documents, such as Output Jobs, Harness Definition files, Annotation files, Libraries, or even generated documentation.

Providing a fuller, richer graphical browsing experience of your open projects and their constituent documents, Altium Designer provides the Workspace view – one of several views available under Altium Designer's Home page.

The Workspace view - command central for graphically browsing open projects and their documents.

Accessing the Workspace View

The Workspace view can be accessed in the following ways:

• With the Home page the active document, clicking the Workspace tab.
• Using the View » Workspace menu command.
• Clicking the  icon, from an Editor's Standard toolbar.
• Using the Ctrl+` keyboard shortcut.

Browsing a Specific Project

The Opened Projects region of the view lists, as its name suggests, all projects that are currently open. Different icons are used to depict each project type, enabling graphical ease of browsing when many projects of differing type are open concurrently. Only one project can be browsed within the view at any given time, and this is distinguished by a highlighted background. Click on a project entry to select it for browsing.

The project currently being browsed is highlighted in the Opened Projects list.

With the desired project selected in the list, the remaining sections in the view present its constituent documents. Documents are gathered into logical groupings, similar to the sub-folder structuring found in the Projects panel. The exact groupings will depend on the type of project being viewed.

Constituent documents displayed when browsing different example projects.

Performing Project- and Document-Level Actions

Actions can be performed at the project- and document-level, directly from within the Workspace view. Simply select the project or constituent document, then right-click to access a menu of commands available, and in context with the type of project/document selected. These commands are identical to those found when right-clicking over the project or document entry in the Projects panel.

Perform actions on projects or documents directly from the Workspace view.

Filtering

Use the filtering control at the top-right of the view to quickly find a particular project or document – a beneficial aide if many projects are open, or for projects containing a sizable number of documents. The content of the view will dynamically update as you enter a filter string.

Use filtering to quickly locate a project or document of interest.

Preferences

Clicking on the Preferences control at the top-right of the view gives access to various display-related options, shown in the image below and described thereafter. Note that these options are global and apply to all open projects in the view.

Access display-based preferences for the Workspace view.

Enable the Show VCS status option to display the current VCS state of each file that is under version control. The applicable state icon is displayed at the bottom-right of a project/document icon, or document preview.

Example of VCS states displayed for a project under version control.

Enable the Mark Device Sheets option to add a 'Recycle' watermark graphic to the graphical preview of any device sheets used in a project. This enables you to quickly distinguish device sheets from standard schematic sheets.

Example marking of device sheets with option disabled (top) and then enabled (bottom).

Enable the Show full path in hint option to have a document's location displayed in a pop-up hint when the cursor is hovered over that document's entry in the view.

Quickly view where a document is stored, through enabled path hints.

Enable the Show file extensions option to display the extensions for each document in the view. This can be handy until you build familiarity with the icons used to represent the various file types.

Displaying file extensions can make browsing a project's documents that much easier.