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About the Simscape Editing Mode

Suggested Workflows

The Simscape Editing Mode functionality is implemented for customers who perform physical modeling and simulation using Simscape platform and its add-on products: SimDriveline™, SimElectronics®, SimHydraulics, SimMechanics™, and SimPowerSystems™. It allows you to open, simulate, and save models that contain blocks from add-on products in Restricted mode, without checking out add-on product licenses, as long as the products are installed on your machine. It is intended to provide an economical way to distribute simulation models throughout a team or organization.

The Editing Mode functionality supports widespread use of Physical Modeling products throughout an engineering organization by making it economical for one user to develop a model and provide it to many other users.

Specifically, this feature allows a user, model developer, to build a model that uses Simscape platform and one or more add-on products and share that model with other users, model users. When building the model in Full mode, the model developer must have a Simscape license and the add-on product licenses for all the blocks in the model. For example, if a model combines Simscape, SimHydraulics, and SimDriveline blocks, the model developer needs to check out licenses for all three products to work with it in Full mode. Once the model is built, model users need only to check out a Simscape license to simulate the model and fine-tune its parameters in Restricted mode. As long as no structural changes are made to the model, model users can work in Restricted mode and do not need to check out add-on product licenses.

Another workflow, available with concurrent licenses only, lets multiple users, who all have Simscape licenses, share a small number of add-on product licenses by working mostly in Restricted mode, and temporarily switching models to Full mode only when they need to perform a specific design task that requires being in Full mode.

What You Can Do in Restricted Mode

When your model is open in Restricted mode, you can:

For other types of changes, listed in the following section, your model has to be in Full mode. Some of these disallowed changes are impossible to make in Restricted mode (for example, Restricted parameters are grayed out in block dialog boxes). Other changes, like changing the physical topology of a model, are not explicitly disallowed, but if you make these changes in Restricted mode, the software will issue an error message when you try to run, compile, or save such a model.

What You Can Do in Full Mode

You need to open a model in Full mode if you need to do any of the following:

Switching Between Modes

The following flow chart shows what happens when you switch between modes.

New models are always created in Full mode. You can then either save the model in Full mode, or switch to Restricted mode and save the model in Restricted mode.

When you load an existing model, the license manager checks whether it has been saved in Full or Restricted mode.

When a model is open, you can transition it between Full and Restricted modes at any time, in either direction:

Example with Multiple Add-On Products

When you try to open a model in Full mode or to switch from Restricted to Full mode, the license manager scans the model and attempts to check out the required add-on product licenses as it encounters them in the model. If a license is not available, the license manager issues an error message and the model stays in Restricted mode. The licenses are checked out sequentially. As a result, if a model uses blocks from multiple add-on products, some of the add-on product licenses may have already been checked out by the time the license manager encounters an unavailable license. In this case, these add-on product licenses stay checked out until you quit the MATLAB session, even though the model is in Restricted mode.

For example, consider a model that uses blocks from SimHydraulics and SimDriveline libraries, but the user who tries to open it has only the SimDriveline license available. It may happen that the license manager checks out a SimDriveline license first, and then tries to check out a SimHydraulics license, which is not available. The license manager then issues an error message and opens the model in Restricted mode, but the SimDriveline license stays checked out until the end of the MATLAB session.

Working with Block Libraries

This section describes the specifics of working with block libraries while using the Editing Mode functionality. These rules are applicable to any physical modeling blocks, that is, blocks from all Simscape libraries, including the add-on products. In general, you need to work in Full mode when you modify a library block. However, when you open a model that references the modified block, you may work in Restricted mode, under certain conditions. The following summary details the Editing Mode rules for modifying and using library blocks:

Resolving Block Library Links

All Simscape blocks in your models, including the add-on products' blocks, must have resolved block library links. You can neither disable nor break these library links. This is a global requirement of Simscape platform, which is necessary to enforce the Editing Mode rules for modifying and using library blocks, listed above. A model with broken library links will neither compile nor save. You must restore all the broken block library links for your model to be valid.

If you want to customize certain blocks and use them in your models, you must add these modified blocks to your own custom library, then copy the block instances that you need to your model.

  


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Learn more about Simulink through this collection of videos, articles, technical literature and the Getting Started with Simulink Guide.

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