(Altium Designer 19.1) How to get document parameters to apply?

[0culus]

I'm relatively new to Altium, picking it up to facilitate collaboration with a friend on some (noncommercial) projects (student licenses FTW). I've been working on learning the basics, have schematic generation down pretty well. One thing I cannot figure out though, is how to change the title and stuff on a schematic sheet. I finally found the document options (they moved it sometime before version 19 it seems), but updating the parameters seems to have no effect on the document. Refreshing doesn't seem to help either. How do I do this simple thing?

[pigrew]

As I remember, the default sheet template does not include the "parameters" for Title, etc. One has to manually put the texboxes in the proper places....

There are a few included sheet templates that do use parameters, or you can design your own template. If a text field starts with an equals sign (like "=Title"), it'll do parameter replacement.

I agree, it isn't user friendly.

[0culus]

Thanks! That's...super lame. Guess you can't have everything. On the whole, it's not a terrible piece of software; actually fairly well polished aside from edge cases like this. I've used far worse (and far more expensive) specialty software at work. The particular example I'm thinking of costs >50k USD per seat and is absolute garbage in terms of UX and stability.

[Bud]

You can either place text labels that have "=Parameter" in it , where Parameter is the name of the parameter you edit in Document Options. Or open and edit a template (.schdot I believe) , do the same thing in the template, save it and then apply that template to the schematic sheet, again in Document Options->Templates.

[T3sl4co1l]

Oh you'll find plenty more edges, this is nothing.

Yeah, the templates are pretty flexible, give a look through the built-in libraries (I don't know where they're putting them these days; used to be installed under Public Documents), there are some templates in there I think.  You can open templates as-is, and see the objects in them, and see what special strings they use.  Or open them as new schematics (the templated stuff is inaccessible) and use them.

Tim

[SerieZ]

I agree that Altium could provide a better default sheet.
However of the many rough edges Altium does have I feel like this is not really one of them.

Ive made myself a template a long time ago, with thought out parameter established (some been removed or added over time) and I am now happy I can quickly start a new project with a simple "works for most-(but customizable)" template I made myself and which looks really neat and professional.

[0culus]

I've yet to find any piece of software that doesn't have some kind of "wtf were they thinking" type of annoyance. 

I was able to get what I wanted by switching to the `A4' template available in the default list. I will probably work on creating my own that can use parameters. 

[Pseudobyte]

Parameters and templates are very powerful time savers in terms of new documents, and output generation. The way I have them setup is all of my parameters only exist at the project level. This way you only need to go to one location to update all the relevant information for any given project. The project parameters can flow down into each document (schematic, pcb, draftsman, etc), it is absolutely fantastic. And when i go to generate a document package, I hit one or two buttons and the file naming is generated via the parameter information as well. Very streamlined, I think it could be one of altium's best features.

For file naming you can make concatenated expressions like this:

=assm+'.'+printassmrev+OutputName

[0culus]

Would you mind sharing how to set that up? That sounds very powerful and useful. 

[T3sl4co1l]

A caution about parameters in OutJobs: when copying the file to another project, the parameters aren't updated (again, at least in v16 and thereabouts).  So you can get weird behavior before filling out project parameters.

Tim

[Pseudobyte]

Would you mind sharing how to set that up? That sounds very powerful and useful. 

sure I can throw together an example project for everyone

[Pseudobyte]

I didn't do all the work for everyone . But i did list all the parameters that I use, so you might be able to get an idea of what I do. I included two outputs. If you have any specific questions I would be happy to answer them via PM.