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Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide
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.

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)
- 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.
  - Add a Flow
  - Flow Library Packager vovflowcompiler
    The tool vovflowcompiler creates a packaged flow, or .pp file from a Tcl format flow description file. You use some additional procedures defined in $VOVDIR/tcl/vtcl/vovflowlib.tcl to specify the description and parameters of the flow.
  - Flow Library Procedures
- 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

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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.

Flow Library Components

The Flow Library consists of three main components:


Component	Description
addflow.cgi	Browser-based wizard to guide user
`vovflowcompiler`	Script to package information about a flow
`vovflowlib`	Tcl library procedures for packaged flows

How to Package a Flow for the Flow Library

The information about a flow is extracted from the prepared Tcl description of the flow and placed in a file with a .pp extension. This file is placed in the Flow Library directory structure so that information about the flow may be presented in the browser.

You package a flow for the library by placing some procedures from the Tcl library vovflowlib.tcl in your regular Flow.tcl file that defines the steps of the flow, then run vovflowcompiler, which produces and optionally installs the .pp file.

How to Select and Deploy a Flow from the Flow Library

Point your browser to the home page of your FlowTracer project and click the Add Flow button at the bottom, or go directly to the AddFlow browser-based UI to add a flow. Follow the steps outlined on the left-hand side of the browser pages.