Editing Arbiter Component Properties
In a Schematic document, all placed objects have an associated properties dialog, typically accessed from the right-click context menu or by double-clicking directly on the object. In an OpenBus System document, there are no such properties dialogs. Viewing and editing of properties relating to an object – which will be mostly graphical in nature – are carried out using the OpenBus Inspector or OpenBus List panels. These panels can be opened using the OpenBus panel access button, to the bottom-right of the main design window.
Figure 1 illustrates these panels for an Arbiter component selected within an example OpenBus System.
Figure 1. View and modify properties for a selected Arbiter component directly in either the OpenBus Inspector or OpenBus List panels.
The OpenBus Inspector panel also offers quick, efficient editing of parameters across multiple components in the OpenBus System document. For more complex control over the update of parameters across the entire FPGA design project – including components on both top-level schematic and underlying OpenBus System document – use the Parameter Editor Table For Project dialog (Tools » Parameter Manager).
User-defined filtering
The OpenBus Inspector and OpenBus List panels enable you to interrogate and edit the properties of one or more selected objects – either in the current OpenBus System document, or across all open OpenBus System documents. When used in conjunction with appropriate filtering, these panels enable you to target and edit multiple objects of the same kind with greater accuracy and efficiency. Such user-defined filtering can be achieved through use of the OpenBus Filter panel – accessed from the same menu as all other OpenBus-related panels. The OpenBus Filter panel allows you to construct filters through the creation of logical queries.
Figure 2 illustrates use of the OpenBus Filter panel to select all Arbiter components in an example OpenBus System, using the query expression OpenBusComponentKind = 'Arbiter'.
Figure 2. Filtering multiple similar objects using the OpenBus Filter panel and a well-defined query.
This is a simple example, and the two Arbiter components could easily have been selected manually. Imagine however, if there had been several OpenBus-based projects and you wanted to change a property common to all Arbiter components in a single sweep – now that's where use of the filter comes into its own, with the change made courtesy of the OpenBus Inspector or OpenBus List panels.