Quartus II 7.0. Hierarchical block design. Pain with the symbol modifications.

[Altera_Forum]

Hi all, 

 I am pretty new in Altera camp, thus this may be a dead horse already. However, as couldn't find any earlier discussions on this, boldly throwing this simple problem to this arena to stimulate your wisdom.  The thing I am doing is: - A design with two hierarchy levels.  * top level is a block schematic  * the lower level is a pile of vhdl entities - I create symbols for each vhdl entities and place them on the top schematic. fine. Now I want to add one port to one of the vhdl entities and rename one port. The problem is: How do I make those changes visible on the symbol?  What I have tried so far is: - I tried to recreate the symbol.  * the problem is that in order to create a symbol, I need to compile the whole project successfully! As the symbol does not match to the vhdl entity, compilation fails. Which means that no symbols were created... :( or - I could manually edit the symbol! What a nice idea dating back to the early days of schematic editors.... Well, unfortunately that miserably fails with Quartus. Quartus allows me happily to delete a pin from a symbol or rename it, but not add!  So basically the only way to get through is to create separate projects for all the vhdl blocks and import them to the design (or stick with vhdl-only design).  I cannot believe all this, thus would like to know if others have had similar moments of swear&sweat.  Would be nice if, either - compiler compiles only the hierarchy up to the design for which the symbol is created,  elsif - for symbol creation only the entity part is compiled (i.e. not touching the architechture...),  elsif - The symbol editor allows adding pins...  Any input is appreciated.

[Altera_Forum]

Sounds pretty much like how I do things, except I use Verilog. When in the HDL editor I just select File > Create/Update > Create Symbol Files for Current File. There's no manual editing of symbols required. In the schematic, right click on the symbol you've changed and select 'Update Symbol or Block...'.

[Altera_Forum]

Sharkybaba, 

 Thank you for your comment. Reading that someone else is doing fine with the feature made me try harder. Started a new project from scratch, copy&pasted my design and now it works fine. Could be that the design I was originally hacking was created with older version of Quartus (5.something) thus there may have been some discrepancies in data formats etc.  Still hoping that the symbol update wouldn't recreate everything, i.e. forgetting earlier pin locations in the symbol...   Anyway, thanks a lot!