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Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide
Miscellaneous
Create New Tcl Commands
The Tcl interface allows you to manipulate the trace using Tcl scripts. This chapter covers the basics about writing Tcl scripts and executing them in VOV. In fact, most VOV commands such as vsr and vovforget are implemented by means of Tcl scripts.

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An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
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Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
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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.
- 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
  - Controlling Jobs on Tasker Host
    From Tcl, you can control both the taskers and the jobs running on the remote taskers with the procedure vtk_job_control.
  - Customize the Browser Interface
  - TclXML Parser
  - Create New Tcl Commands
    The Tcl interface allows you to manipulate the trace using Tcl scripts. This chapter covers the basics about writing Tcl scripts and executing them in VOV. In fact, most VOV commands such as vsr and vovforget are implemented by means of Tcl scripts.
  - Set Names
    Every set has a name and the name must be unique.
  - vovexport
    Generates a file in FDL (i.e. Tcl), C-Shell, or Makefile syntax from a subset of the trace.
  - GUI_Label Property
  - Limits for Objects and Strings
  - Upgrading to 2019.9 and Beyond

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Create New Tcl Commands

The Tcl interface allows you to manipulate the trace using Tcl scripts. This chapter covers the basics about writing Tcl scripts and executing them in VOV. In fact, most VOV commands such as vsr and vovforget are implemented by means of Tcl scripts.

Tcl Interpreters with VOV Extensions

Many VOV tools contain a Tcl interpreter.

For interactive use, choose Tools > Tcl Interpreter in the Console.
For batch processing you can choose between vovbuild and vovsh. The two tools differ in their behavior after the script has been executed.
Use vovbuild with the -f option. After the script has completed, vovbuild exits.
```
% vovbuild -f <tclScript>
```
Use vovsh with the -f option. After the script has completed, vovsh enters a loop to manage the user interface and exits when the top level window of the user interface is dismissed. If no window is created by the script, vovsh exits immediately.
```
% vovsh -f <tclScript>
```

The packages Tk and Tix are available in these interpreters, but for performance reasons they are disabled by default and they need to be activated explicitly calling vovClientInit. For example:

vovClientInit tk ; # Initialize Tk.
vovClientInit tix; # Initialize Tk and Tix.
vovClientInit all; # Initialize all packages, i.e. Tk and Tix.

These interpreters also have access to all the VOV extensions, that is all the "vtk" procedures. For more information on the vtk procedures, refer to the VOV/Tcl Interface section in the VOV Reference Guide.

Tcl Intepreters without VOV Extensions

The VOV distribution contains two other Tcl interpreters which are already familiar to those using Tcl. One is vtclsh, which is the VOV version of tclsh. The differences between tclsh and vtclsh are :

we use a different name to avoid conflicts with other versions of tclsh;
vtclsh is instrumented with VIL, the VOV Instrumentation Library;
by default, vtclsh uses the libraries included in the VOV distribution.

The other interpreter is wish, which differs from the original only because it is an instrumented tool.

Many scripts in the VOV distribution use vtclsh.

You can invoke these interpreters with the proper options as illustrated below:

% vtclsh <script>
% wish -f <script>