Relink Design Components to Managed Components

Summary: 

This video demonstrates how unmanaged projects can use managed components, even when a user is offline and using a local machine.  In order to link this local project to an Altium 365 Workspace and integrate the resources of Altium 365 into this project, open tools and then the Item Manager.
  
The Item Manager will scan the design and load any components within the design, showing that they are unmanaged.  To relink these components located in the local library to the Altium 365 components, click auto match to match each component.  If any components fail to match, users can select and navigate to the individual components and manually match them.  Then, an ACL and ECO are generated, the changes are executed, and the components are updated.  After this is completed, all of the components are updated to the latest revision.  

Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:28:28
Hello. In this video, we'll take a look at managing your components within your design and updating them from using non managed components to components that are in your Altium 365 Workspace; otherwise, your managed component library. This is an example of a project that was created offline as a local project that I may want to move into Altium 365 and migrate it there to make it a managed project or two.

00:00:28:29 - 00:00:50:24
Can I keep it offline and go ahead and use Altium 365 components? Absolutely. Another scenario may be that I started this design. It does have components that are outside of the workspace and included in it, and I want to relink some of those components back to it as well. But in this example this project is 100% offline. It's located on my machine.

00:00:50:27 - 00:01:11:10
And I'm going to use it as an example to show that even unmanaged projects can use managed components, even though they start off as not doing so. As you'll see, if I click on a component here and then look at it's properties, the source information indicates that it's local, located in a schematic library. Either on my local machine or network.

00:01:11:12 - 00:01:37:06
So it's pulling the information from there, and it's not linked to my components in my Altium 365 Workspace. I want to resolve that because I want to take advantage of the resources that are available to manage components in Altium 365, such as real time part information, resources, updated information that comes along with having those components being managed, not just from external third party tools, but even internally with my team.

00:01:37:08 - 00:01:57:17
So I'm going to go ahead and use the Item Manager to update these components. First, let's go to Tools, Item Manager to load the Item Manager. It's going to scan the design and load all components that are a part of this particular design. In this project you'll see all components are not managed, in a sense.

00:01:57:17 - 00:02:16:24
They were located in a local library and not in my Altium 365 Workspace. So I want to change that. I want to go ahead and relink these components to an Altium 365 component, and make sure I'm taking advantage of the benefits there. Now, I do know, for example, that these components already exist in my Altium 365 Workspace.

00:02:16:24 - 00:02:37:16
So I know that I can obviously relink them to those particular components. And the easy way to do so is just click auto match and it's going to scan through based on comment information, details within the component of my schematic library or the information that I brought in locally. It's going to scan my workspace components to find the matching components.

00:02:37:16 - 00:02:59:17
If it finds matching components, it'll identify those and try to set it up as what I'm going to lead to. So as you can see here, the new component it's going to lead to has the CMP Number indicating that it's coming from an Altium 365 Workspace. So currently this is the state and this is what I want to transition to. So now I've be able to auto match those components.

00:02:59:24 - 00:03:23:25
That's great. But an example where I may not be able to find a particular component or it doesn't match it easily. You can identify those components yourself just by selecting here and browsing and navigating to a particular component within the workspace. So now that I've identified all the components that I do want to get updated, I'm going to go ahead and do so by generating an ACL and make those changes on the schematic level.

00:03:23:28 - 00:03:50:29
So I'm going to go ahead go to ECO, generate ECO, identify the changes that it wants to make, including what it's going to be able to modify and link those components to and make sure all the information is updated. Execute those changes. You'll see everything goes through well. And now you can see here it's indicated these components are all not only from my Altium 365 Devo Workspace, but they're up to date.

00:03:51:01 - 00:04:09:27
And this is important because many times there may be components that get modified without us being aware. So now I know I'm also using the latest revision of that specific part. So we'll go ahead and close this. Go back to my design to confirm that those changes have in fact taken place. So now you can see I have new source information.

00:04:09:29 - 00:04:20:15
It's up to date. And then I have all the resources available from my Altium 365 Workspace being applied to my components now. Thank you very much. I hope this video has been helpful.