Meta-Comment for Command Line Arguments - 2020.2 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Using Tcl Scripting (UG894)

Document ID
UG894
Release Date
2021-03-30
Version
2020.2 English

The user proc's command line arguments must be described with the meta-comment Argument Usage inside the user procs. This meta-comment is used by the Help system to generate the message when < command > -help is executed by the user or when the proc help is displayed in the GUI. For example:

  # Argument Usage:
  # [-verbose]: Verbose mode
  # [-file <arg>]: Report file name
  # [-append]: Append to file
  # [-return_string]: Return report as string
  # [-usage]: Usage information

The above meta-comment Argument Usage generates the following message from the Help system:

Syntax: 
xilinx::designutils::write_template [-verbose] [-file <arg>] [-append]
                                     [-return_string] [-usage] [-quiet]
Usage: 
  Name       Description
  -----------------------------
  [-verbose]    Verbose mode
                    Default: 0
  [-file]      Report file name
                    Default: None
  [-append]     Append to file
                    Default: 0
  [-return_string] Return report as string
                    Default: 0
  [-usage]     Usage information
                    Default: 0
  [-quiet]     Ignore command errors

It is important to keep in mind that the meta-comment Argument Usage is not a preprocessing of the command line argument by Vivado before calling the Tcl proc. It is only used by the Help system. The Tcl code of the proc has to handle the complete processing of the command line arguments.