There has been a long standing (since the beginning of the project?)
issue with sharing schematics between projects. It has been somewhat
supported for complex hierarchies (a sheet shared multiple times in a
single design) but it has not been well supported for simple hierarchies
(the symbol references cannot be changed in the shared schematic). This
issue has been resolved by moving all of the symbol instance sheet paths
from the symbol definitions in the all of the project files and save all
symbol path instances in the root sheet. This ensures that orphaned
symbol instance paths do not accumulate in shared schematic files and
that designs that reuse schematic in simple hierarchies can how have
different references. It also allows the root schematic from one project
to be uses as a sub-sheet in another project.
When legacy schematics are loaded, all sheet and symbol UUIDs are
converted from time stamps to true UUIDs. This is done to ensure there
are no sheet path instance clashes between projects. That being said,
there are no checks for this. It is assumed that the probability of
UUID clashes is so low that it doesn't make sense to test for them.
Please note that the symbol cache is not embedded in the schematic file
to allow for round robin testing with the existing file format. Once
the parser round robin testing is complete, the symbol cache will be
embedded in the schematic file.
This implements all existing symbol library object support and the ability
to save and load symbol library files between file formats for round robin
testing.
CHANGES: Symbol library file format has been converted to s-expressions.
Add support code for picking apart symbols at some future junction that
will allow full inheritance conversion of existing symbol libraries. For
now, symbols arranged by unit and body style numbers are nested for round
robin testing of symbol libraries once the parser is complete.
Wayne Stambaugh
jean-pierre charras