Issue link: https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/i/1180190
Migration Guide for Allegro Platform Products Core Allegro Platform Back-End Products October 2019 38 Product Version 17.4-2019 © 1999-2019 All Rights Reserved. User Interface Changes and Form Migration In release 17.4-2019, PCB layout tools have been enhanced to provide a modern, clean look to the canvas as well as improved support for high resolution displays. Tools display increased consistency when using machines running different operating systems. The new environment provides you with additional controls, behaviors, and functional elements – in the native forms that you use every day and in those that you design for your team's use. An example would be the ability to set a form grid field to automatically resize column widths to fit the data in them, like the behavior you get with any spreadsheet tool on the market today. List, tree, and grid fields can be set to expand to fill the available space where they are located on the form, eliminating your need to make incremental tweaks to arrive at the final sizing. With such large-scale change, there is an impact on your use of the tool. This section provides examples of changes you may notice in the display of your forms relative to their appearance in 17.2 and earlier releases. With each example, we provide the most common causes for the difference and recommendations for modifying your form file layout to achieve results consistent with the 17.2 rendering. These are recommendations only. You are welcome – even encouraged – to try the new release and restructure your forms to maximize user friendliness and productivity. And, as ever, should you need assistance or have comments or questions, we are here to help you in your migration to the new software release. Note: Should you need to support your forms for users running both 17.4 and 17.2 at the same time, with your forms and SKILL code located in a common site repository used by BOTH releases, you should consider having two versions of the forms. You can pick which form to use based on the return value of the (axlVersion 'version) SKILL function. If this is >= 17.4, use your new form's name; if it returns an earlier version, use the older form's name. This allows everything to coexist in the same directory with the best possible experience for your users. If you write your form files dynamically from skill, you can use this same function to write different values depending on what software version your user is running. ■ To ensure that forms pick the latest sizing and placement information, delete allegro.geo file from pcbenv directory when migrating to 17.4 release. ❑ The 17.2 version of allegro.geo file can be renamed to preserve 17.2 specific placement configuration. You can switch between two versions of .geo file as needed. ■ Scripting support for SHIFT + Ctrl to multi-select entries in list or grid fields in forms is not supported.