Home
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.
Flow Library Procedures

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

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Flow Library Procedures

This section documents the procedures for use with vovflowcompiler, the tool for packaging Flow.tcl scripts for inclusion in the Flow Library. You use these procedures in the Flow.tcl file you submit to vovflowcompiler to assign values to the metadata about the flow. These metatdata values are displayed to the user when they browse the Flow Library using the Add Flow CGI script.

These are the procedures:


Tcl Procedure	Description
Description	Assign the description of the purpose of a flow
Keywords	Assign the keywords associated with a flow
Parameter	Assign characteristics of a parameter of flow. The facets you can assign are: Default value Documentation string Valid range Data type List of choices for a select type parameter Field width
GetAllParametersFromTk	Get flow parameters from a Tcl/Tk application
GetAllPararametersFromHTML	Get flow parameters from a browser-based application
GetAllParametersFromCLI	Get flow parameters from a command-line application
RequiredFile	Test for presence of file needed by flow, copy from sample if any
RequiredDirectory	Test whether a directory needed by the flow exists