Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.0.
FlowTracer Overview
An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
FlowTracer Tutorials
Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide
- FlowTracer Roles
  When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
- Environment Management
  To ensure the correct and repeatable behavior of the tools, the environment must be controlled. This chapter explains how VOV supports multiple reusable environments.
- Execute Jobs From the Command Line
- Flowbuilding
  The trace is built using a combination of techniques.
- Flow Description Language (FDL)
  - Flow Language Procedures
  - FDL Procedures Reference
  - J versus T
    In FDL there are two procedures that can be used to add a job to a flow: T and J. Which one should you use?
  - Build Flows with vovbuild
  - Conflicts in vovbuild
  - Use O_CONFLICT to Choose Behavior in Case of Output Conflict
  - vovbuild Argument Parsing
  - Task Oriented Flows
  - Dependencies in FDL
  - Forcing Dependencies
  - vtk_transition_add
  - Difference Between E and ves
  - Linear Coding in FDL
  - Set Creation in FDL
  - Conditional Flows
  - Decisions in Flows with IFJOB
  - Parse Configuration Files
  - RECONCILE_WITH_FILE_SYSTEM
  - Create Directories in FDL
  - File Generation in FDL
  - Generate FDL Using the Instrumentation Library
  - Run Jobs in an xterm
  - FDL and make Comparison
  - Run Interactive Jobs with vxt
  - Tcl Interface to Various Set Operations
- Tool Integration
- Integrate Difficult Tools
- Runtime Change Propagation Control
  The patented technique of Runtime Change Propagation Control (RCPC) provides the ability to stop the propagation of insignificant changes through the flow.
- Flow Library
  FlowTracer captures your design in design flows described by Flow.tcl files. The Flow Library is meant to help users locate and deploy instances of packaged flows bound to their specific design data.
- Files, Equivalences, Exclusions
  The files used in a project reside in one or more directories spread all around your filesystems. Each logical name defined in the equiv.tcl file implicitly declares the root of a workspace. You can browse the workspaces using the browser interface.
- Makefile Conversion
- Advanced Tasker Topics
- Resource Management
  The Resource Map Set represents the collection of resource maps that have been assigned to a project and the constraints associated with such resources.
- CGI Interface
- Events
  Every change in the trace is recorded as an event, which is then sent to all clients that subscribe to them.
- Miscellaneous

Forcing Dependencies

To force a dependency that is not a "runtime dependency" you can include "Sticky" dependencies to your flow description. Since all jobs require at least one output to be valid, using sticky is a good way to keep a dependency around without having to instrument it or declare it as an output during execution of the job.

Example:

J vw cp aa bb
I -sticky /usr/man/man1/cp.1

To force all dependencies to be sticky by default, use the option -s in vovbuild when building the flow:

% vovbuild -s -f Flow.tcl