Multi person work on one PCB - Altium DXP 2004

I assume that you are asking about multiple persons working on the file at the same time, not over different time periods.

What you are asking cannot be done with any reasonable assurance of no troubles. There may be methods of doing this but the product is not intended for that type of use, plain and simple. It isn't a $30k - $60k+ UNIX package.

Most decent programs will put up a dialog stating that someone else is using the program, and "would you like to open a read-only copy of the file?"

Protel allows Design Teams to work on the same project, but not on the same file. For example someone could work on the schematic, and someone else could work on the PCB of the same open Design (Protel used a single .ddb file to keep all the projects in). I'm not aware of any PC based layout program that allows multiple seats to simultaneously work on the same open PCB.

An Altium sales rep could answer this pretty quickly. And the cool thing is that they never, ever, ever, ever, ever lose your phone number. In fact they will call monthly just to make sure it hasn't changed, and to verify you don't want to upgrade.

Chris

As does Protel/Altium software, Joel.

-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.

Thanks Brad, good to know.

Windows gets upset at numerous people trying to update the same file. The only around it would be to split the project into 2 PCB's (if possible) and put them on the same panel later.

That isn't really true. Windows (and other OSes) have plenty of fancy file locking mechanisms available, whereby you can completely lock a file, lock certain poritions of it, made various parts read only and others read/write, etc. -- it's just that in many cases there's no particular need for them. The point here is that Windows is perfectly happy to let numerous processes (users) update a single file simultaneously, but the onous is on the application to insure that doing this "makes sense."

Its not possible for 2 applications to alter the same file and send it back to disc. You would end up with the last write overwriting the first one.

Most applications have a very simple view of files. You read it, modify it, the write it back.

Microsoft are one of the few companies that keeps looking at files to see if they have been updated since it was loaded. Its a big overhead in software and most programmers dont do it.

Sure, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I was just pointing out that operating systems have provisions for all sort of fancy file-locking semantics, and it's up to the application software to make use of these in a meaningful manner.

Agreed, many applications do take this approach.

Just "listening" for file modification events is actually not particularly difficult at all... at least if you've already built yourself some GUI-based program that has to listen for various system events anyway. Then putting up a "Ignore or reload?" dialog and firing off a re-load events is probably no more than 25-50 lines of code total.

---Joel

Joel, Since you always seem so interested in various CAD system comments. On the issues you are discussing, Protel P99SE/Altium AD does this fairly well. It will allow multiple users to open single files, notifying each that there are others with the same file open. Should one of the parties revise and save the file, the program notifies everyone of the change. It then suggests that they may want to update their files to reflect the recently saved changes.

This does not allow for multiple users to work on the same design file though. There are manners by which multiple Protel/Altium designers can work on the files but it is the same for each and every CAD package. Manually divide and conquer, then paste the various finished blocks back together. It is workable but requires tremendous caution, great communication and excellent cooperation.

-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.

But this doesnt work ! What if 2 people at the same time modify a file? Which one should the system take as being the right one Point proved !

Marra, It does work for monitoring file status when multiple users access the same file. I have never had the file status monitoring in Protel/Altium CAD products fail when users access the same file. Your proven point, was already raised as not being a feasible expectation with most PC (Windows/DOS) CAD systems. So you proved what point, that previous posters comments were already right?

You seem to enjoy making obtuse remarks or is it just to listen to yourself talk?

ok, on the idea of multi-person work on a PCB.

What you would need would be a multi-window application, where each individual is actually working on the same 'internal' database. It would necessitate a lot of network action, as each users manipulations of the data would need to IMMEDIATELY appear in all other users virtual database. It might actually be doable, but would get real interesting as the user count went up!

Charlie

If Cadence is interested in doing this, perhaps they could hire some of the programmers from, e.g., Everquest or one of the other massively multiplayer games? Now *there's* a difficult "simultaneous access" problem: Even though the games are split across many servers, there's typically still thousands of users accessing the same "zone" whereby any changes they make have to be propagated to everyone else if they're relevant.

Altium sounds like it's one step ahead of ORCAD in that Brad tells us it keeps listening for file changes even after you've opened a read only copy because Joe down the hallway is modifiyng the schematic. As far as I can tell, ORCAD tells you just when you try to open the file that it's read-only or nothing, and after that it quits listening for file update messages. I'm not complaining though -- while ORCAD's behavior in this regard is about the minimum I'd expect, it's also adequate for my uses.

---Joel

Joel, Don't know if I said something that you interpretted as multiple file openings being "read only" but that was not the intent. The files are all 'live' unless you have taken some other measure to make them read only. Any user could save their copy and destroy anybody else's copy.

A user can modify their copy that they are viewing and save the file, thus overwriting the original copy they had first opened. A user that opened an earlier copy and didn't modify it could then save and overwrite any newer saved versions. So as Marra stressed it is not without jeapardy. However it does monitor the file status, alert multiple users and then advise them when the file is modified allowing them to update their copy to the last saved version.

I see this all the time as both me and our other designer unknowingly access our company libraries to add new parts or modify parts simultaneously. With our libraires divided up between different sub-libraries within the P99SE DDB file format, we can modify and save different sub-libraries simultaneously but if we monitor the file status messages and take heed, it keeps us from undesired modifications of the same libraries undoing each others changes. With DXP\\AD I think that capability is still viable with most files because they should still be doing the monitoring, I haven't heard from any of the users of the newer versions that this was undone on their development path.

Hi Brad,

Ah, thanks for the clarification; my mistake.

---Joel

Offerings form both Mentor and Cadence offer team based design solutions. Expedition for example provides a client/server architecture where by a server is setup, the base PCB is fed into it, people are then designated areas on the pcb (boundaries are then administered via the server. people from other areas wanting to route into your area are blocked off until you "ok" their routes or placements.

Because your routing actions are registered with the server there is the added benefit of having two different source control views, one is your local/incremental view, and one of the "universal/holistic" view, essentially every action is given a unique time-stamp that is administered by the server, from that the whole routing process can be replayed, diff'ed etc either as a whole or as specific couplings, more interestingly this can help to efficiently compute the total amount of work any one individual has committed to the PCB.

That said from personal experience, I do not believe Altium Designer will have this functionality until some serious refactoring is done in both their PCB back-end logic and drawing logic.

Arash Partow __________________________________________________ Be one who knows what they don't know, Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know, Thinking they know everything about all things.