Researching Projects

During the lifecycle of a project, the first step in the process is typically to research existing work and identify any components which may be of value in reusing as a dependency for the new project. This section highlights different ways to discover and gain information about existing projects and their design units.

Assumptions

The guides in this section place no assumption on where your working directory is when running any commands; that is, these commands can be ran from any directory.

Guides

• Viewing existing projects
• Gathering information about a project
• Gathering information about a core
• Reading source code of a core

Viewing existing projects

This guide outlines how to see what projects exist on your system in your catalog that could be potentially used as a dependency.

1. Display all results from the catalog:

$ orbit search

This will return a list of the known projects, where each line records the project's name, latest known version, status in the catalog, and UUID.

Gathering information about a project

This guide outlines how to view more information about a project found in your catalog that may be of particular interest.

1. Identify the name of a project in the catalog that may be of interest:

$ orbit search

1. Return the list of all possible versions of the project in the catalog, where <project> is the name of the project of interest:

$ orbit info <project> --versions

1. Return the metadata found in the project's manifest, where <project> is the name of the project of interest and <vesion> is the version of the project of interest:

$ orbit info <project>:<version>

1. Return the list of accessible IP cores for the project, where <project> is the name of the project of interest and <version> is the version of the project of interest:

$ orbit info <project>:<version> --units

This will return a list of the project's design units, where each line records the design unit's name, design unit type, and accessibility.

Gathering information about a core

This guide outlines how to view a design unit's declaration for a particular design unit of a project found in the catalog.

1. Return the design unit's declaration, where <unit> is the name of the design unit, <project> is the name of the project of interest, and <version> is the version of the project of interest:

$ orbit get <unit> --project <project>:<version>

Reading source code of a core

This guide outlines how to view the source code for a particular design unit of a project found in the catalog.

1. Display the contents from the design unit's source file, where <unit> is the name of the design unit, <project> is the name of the project of interest, and <version> is the version of the project of interest:

$ orbit read <unit> --project <project>:<version>

Tip: For large source files, it may be helpful to redirect the output to a temporary file, or use the --save flag to automatically write the results to a temporary read-only file.