Validating Component Status in Altium Designer

Parent page: Working with the Project Releaser

Managed 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 also needs to be automated checking at the release validation stage, to verify that they are indeed in the right state to be used.

Altium Designer, in conjunction with your managed content server, provides an elegant solution to this, in the form of Component State Checking. A 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 server - 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 Server Objects State Validation dialog.

Add and configure a component state check as part of your overall validation regimen during board design release.

The dialog presents all lifecycle definitions defined for the managed content server to which you are actively signed in. 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.

Click the  button to refresh the dialog with the latest lifecycle definition information, directly from the server.

Revisions of Component Items used in the design that are in a restricted state (one whose Check Action has been set to Error) will prevent the release of the board from happening. The generated report file will list all warnings and errors.