Terms Used in Cadence User Interface

These key terms are used to define various features and properties of Cadence User Interface:

• Coordinate Systems
  There are two coordinate systems used in specifying dag object properties and dag function parameters:
  • screen coordinates. These have their origin at the upper left and are specified in terms of pixels.
  • dag coordinates. These have their origin at the lower left. You determine the magnitude of these coordinates by the height and width you assign to classes.
• Context-Sensitive Pop-Up Menus and Actions
  Defines context-sensitive pop-up menus and accelerators (bindkeys) for nodes or classes. The specifications for these are called action lists.
• Display Lists, Icons, and SKILL Objects
  Creates icon for display in the browser using the display list interface. To make those icons reflect information available only at run time, you can use the SKILL object feature of display lists. You can also interactively create display lists without SKILL objects using the Graphics Editor Save Icon command.
• Intrinsic Property Inheritance
  Browser nodes inherit a subset of the intrinsic properties of their class. There is a distinction between properties that you add to a browser object (user-defined) and those that are there when an object is created (intrinsic). Only intrinsic properties are inherited.
  Inheritance means that, if a node does not have the desired property, the dag functions look for a property by the same name in the node’s class. If it does not find the named property in either the node or class, it returns nil.
• Kinds of Browser (dag) Objects
  The object types are: class, node, arc, and tool. Each of these can have user-defined properties in addition to the intrinsic properties listed.
• Window Types and Their Properties
  A window type is a basic SKILL data type. Dag arc, class, node, and tool objects all are of this data type. In the type specifications for dag properties and dag function parameters and return values, a w prefix indicates that the object must be this data type.
  The straight arrow notation (−>) is used to access and modify both the intrinsic and user-defined properties of browser objects. For example, to find out the name of a class object, you would enter
  name = class->name
  and, to change the name of a class, you would enter
  class->name = "newName"
  Unless otherwise specified all attributes of browser objects can be modified as shown above.

Related Topics

Properties of the dagArc

Properties of the dagClass

Properties of the dagNode

Properties of the dagTool

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