How Applications Are Included
When you are developing an application, OpenROAD Workbench lets you use frames and other components that are part of other applications. To refer to these components, you must include in your current application the applications that contain the components you want to use.
An included application can be stored in the database or as an image file. If the included application is in an image file, OpenROAD opens a file descriptor only once for each instance of an included application, regardless of how many times your application references the included application.
Limitations
Keep in mind the following limitations and consequences of including applications from a database or image file:
Testing and debugging:
• Changes in applications included from a database are immediately available. If including applications from an image file, you must first recreate the image file and restart Workbench because the application might already be cached in memory.
• You cannot "step into" a procedure, frame, or method that resides in an application included from an image file.
Image build:
• All database-included applications and their components recursively become part of the image file for the hosting application. This increases the time to build the image and makes the file becomes larger.
Inclusion hierarchy:
• You may have only one inclusion type (either image or database) for all the occurrences of an application name within the included application hierarchy (included applications and, recursively, their included applications).
• You may have a mixture of inclusion types as long as the same application is not included as both types in the application hierarchy. For example, "MasterApp" could include "MasterLib" from the database, where "MasterLib" also includes "Lib1" from an image and "Lib2" from the database.