Renaming an Element

There are two different ways to rename an element:

• By clicking the element name, which appears in green text in the schematic, editing the name in the text box that appears and pressing the Enter key.
• By selecting the element, opening the Properties dialog and changing the name there.

By default, connection names are hidden, but they can be made visible by clicking the Show Connection Names toolbar button or by pressing N. In addition, some block instance names are also hidden, but it can be made visible by selecting the element, opening the Properties dialog and changing the Display settings.

Schematic element names (both block instance and connection names) must adhere to the following rules:

• It must start with a letter, and the other characters can only be letters, numbers, or the underscore character (_).
• It must not be the name of another element in the schematic, except for in special cases specified below. Names are case-sensitive, but it is recommended to avoid having names that are different only by letter case.

In addition, connection names must adhere to the following rules:

• The names of all connections emerging from the same output port instance must have the same names. In other words, the connections emerging from an output port instance has one name in common.
• The name of a connection that is attached to an input or output port block must have the same name as the port. It is not possible to change the names of such connections directly. Instead, the name of the port block must be changed.

Renaming an input or output port may affect other source files that use the block defined by the edited schematic. In this case, a dialog will appear, listing all affected source files. Clicking OK will perform the name change in the schematic editor and update the references to the port in the listed source files. Open source files will be modified in the editor, while files that are not open will be modified directly on disk. For example, consider two schematics Main.sps and SubFunction.sps, where Main uses SubFunction. If a port name is changed in SubFunction.sps, a dialog will appear, informing that the reference to the port in Main.sps will be modified.