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

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Run Interactive Jobs with vxt

You may want to run some of your jobs in an interactive fashion where a user can press [Ctrl]-[C] and take the hand on the tool in a terminal in the middle of a run.

FlowTracer's FDL allows you to run some jobs from inside an X-window terminal by giving some option to the J or T keyword:

-xt: runs the job in an open xterm (steals mouse focus). Logging happens as usual despite the xterm.
-xi: runs the job in an iconified xterm: allows the benefit of running in an xterm without stealing focus from the user when the job starts.
-xb: runs in the background (no need for a DISPLAY even). This is similar to not using any option at all and is implemented for completeness of the user interface.

The developer has full control on the interactive terminal used to run the tool and can alter the properties: VXT_XTERM and VXT_LOG after the J -xt line with a vtk_prop_set.

Changing the VXT_XTERM property would allow for different arguments to be passed to xterm, or a different terminal like konsole or rxvt to be used as examples.

Figure 1.

During vovbuild, the developer can modify a job after its definition by changing the property with something similar to:

vtk_prop_set $node_id VXT_LOG {retval=`exec 3>&1; xterm -sl 20000 -sb -e sh -c "set -o pipefail;}

Once the developer is happy with the changes, it can be made the default for all further jobs in the build by setting "make(VXT_XTERM)" as in:

set make(VXT_XTERM) {retval=`exec 3>&1; xterm -sl 20000 -sb -e sh -c "set -o pipefail;}

Changing the VXT_LOG property would allow for example for capturing the log in a different name file:

Figure 2.

During vovbuild, the developer can modify a job after its definition by changing the property with something similar to:

vtk_prop_set $node_id VXT_LOG {| tee -i .stdlog\$VOV_JOBID.log 2>&1 3>&-; echo $? 1>&3 " `}

Once the developer is happy with the changes, it can be made the default for all further jobs in the build by setting "make(VXT_XTERM)" as in:

set make(VXT_LOG) {| tee -i .stdlog\$VOV_JOBID.log 2>&1 3>&-; echo $? 1>&3 " `}

Note: This feature supports only simple commands (single tool). If you need some complex commands, write them in a small shell script, and use the small shell script as the command line for vxt.