Component Status Validation
Vault-based components offer the designer a formal collection of high-quality, high-integrity, design building-blocks. Revision-controlled and lifecycle-managed, a company can authorize the 'set' of components that can be formally used by their designers, in each new design project embarked upon within that company. However, while Component Items may be authorized for design reuse, there has not been any automated checking at the release validation stage, to verify that they are indeed in the right state to be used. Rather the onus has been on the designer to visually check the lifecycle states of the components in their designs, alerted only by status text and color.
Altium Vault 2.1, in conjunction with Altium Designer 15.0, provides an elegant solution to this, in the form of Component State Checking. A new validation-based outputter is available for addition to an Output Job file - Components states. This can be configured to check for components that are in restricted states. As part of configuration, you determine the action to be taken for each currently defined state, of each currently defined Lifecycle Definition in the target vault - no action, a warning, or generate an error. The latter will prevent release of the design. In addition, running the check will generate a handy HTML-based report, allowing you to see at-a-glance which design components are not in valid states.
Add an output generator of this type from the Validation Outputs section of the OutJob file. Configuration is performed in the Vault Objects State Validation dialog.
Add and configure a component state check as part of your overall validation regime during board design release.
The dialog presents all lifecycle definitions defined for the target vault. For each definition, each uniquely-defined state is listed, along with its description. For each state associated with a lifecycle definition you employ for components in your designs, simply specify the checking action to be taken. Click within a state's Check Action field, and select the required action from the associated drop-down menu. Available checking options are None, Warning, and Error.
Example generated report after running the Component state validation check. Here, the design is found to contain a single component revision in a restricted lifecycle state, and the release process is terminated in failure.