Often, groups of components (or other elements) have special meaning. Subsets provide the Analyst with the ability to document sets of elements within the design. Because they can be defined once and referred to any number of times elsewhere, subsets help reduce the effort required in identifying these groups. Once defined, subsets can be used to constrain analysis or to"slice and dice" statistics based on Analyst-defined categories. eXpress offers five different types of subsets, each one of which is populated differently:
Selection - members are explicitly selected by the Analyst
Although subsets are populated automatically during processing, it is often useful for the operator to view the contents of a subset in the main design window. To do this, the Analyst must compile the subset (otherwise, subsets will be compiled as necessary when used within eXpress analyses).
Compatibility with past versions of
eXpress
Prior to the introduction of subsets in eXpress version 5.7, this capability utilized Operating Modes. When designs that were last saved in a version prior to 5.7 are loaded into the current version of eXpress, Operating Modes are automatically converted into subsets and the Operating Mode is set up to point to the resulting subset.
