Reusing Board Information

It may be that one PCB is used in several of a company’s products, or more than once in a single product (for example a memory card may be used in different places). In such situations, once an XJDeveloper set-up has been completed for one project, a lot of information for that board can be reused elsewhere. This makes the setting up of subsequent boards faster and avoids duplicated effort.

Board information is imported using the Import Existing... button at the bottom of the Boards screen:

Figure 20: Importing Previously Defined Boards

• The file to import has an extension of xje. However, XJDeveloper will have created several XJE files, so care must be taken to import the correct one: the board-level file is the one required, which holds information such as device assignments and netlist location; it is normally identifiable by its filename, which usually has the "Board" prefix – for example, Board-name.xje. The project-level XJE file is not the correct file to import, but that can easily be identified because it will have the same name as the XJD file in the same directory.

• When Import Existing... is used, XJDeveloper adds a reference to the reused board and does not copy files into the project directory. Any changes made to this board (such as device categorisations) will therefore affect the original project. If changes need to be made, it is recommended that the user makes a copy of the board setup.

• A board file can only be used once in a project. If a project uses the same board multiple times, the user should make a copy of the board file manually and then use the Import Existing... button to add it to the project.

This process will import device categorisation information and details of what netlist is being used. However, because the XJE file does not include the location of the schematic, BOM, or any ICT machine setup data, it will be necessary to add those. The steps to do this are identical to those followed when adding files to a board being newly created (see the sections Importing BOM Data and Importing a Schematic above).