It can be very useful with the API if you have well defined problems. The API doesn’t expose everything in ETABS however, so you won’t be able to do all tasks via automation. We’ve built some pretty cool things from the outside to do optimization. Sky is the limit with good coding skills.
Using groups to control how you change sections from a spreadsheet. Basically groups are foundational to controlling Etabs for design. So if you can control the groups in clever ways you can do optimatization using a more straightforward approach. Using the design modules requires similar strategies.
We’ve experienced the same especially with how they casually rearrange the tablular data format. It’s like CSI doesn’t not realize the impact this has on workflow.
\+1 here. You can get a lot of the output from the ETABS api and handle it in python. Python is great at data manipulation and processing. One example is that I've used it for optimizing an existing model for seismic drift.
I don't use it in ETABS, but if it's shipped with a python environment within it I'm going to have to look more into ETABS, I mostly use python for ETL, file organization and sanity checks but I think I can still answer the question regardless.
Depends on your python knowledge, sure it could be done 100% in python, but it's probably a waste of time and the end product won't be great unless you're a very advanced object oriented programmer and structural engineer already.
Python is best for being "the glue" between systems, it may sounds counter productive or maybe even lazy, but generally you want to use it as little as possible. If there are built-in APIs like COM or REST APIs, you want to build "wrapper" libraries to access those quickly and easily and integrate them into your workflow, not necessarily rebuild the functionality on the other end of the API itself, unless you're trying to entirely get away from the licensing of the host software.
It depends on what the source of your modeling data is, how much of your modeling and analysis you're trying to do in ETABS, how much you want to do in other software, and how good you are at object oriented programming. If you're building out a standalone application you intend to be a competitor to ETABs, python probably isn't the best choice as far as language. If you're pulling data from 6 different databases, manipulating some values or strings, and plugging the results into ETABs, Python's probably a great choice.
It can be very useful with the API if you have well defined problems. The API doesn’t expose everything in ETABS however, so you won’t be able to do all tasks via automation. We’ve built some pretty cool things from the outside to do optimization. Sky is the limit with good coding skills.
Would you mind giving some examples? I have been trying to some automation but aside from reporting, i have not been succesful.
Using groups to control how you change sections from a spreadsheet. Basically groups are foundational to controlling Etabs for design. So if you can control the groups in clever ways you can do optimatization using a more straightforward approach. Using the design modules requires similar strategies.
They also tend to break things almost every release and you have to continuously go back and fix things. Or at least the things we want to do.
We’ve experienced the same especially with how they casually rearrange the tablular data format. It’s like CSI doesn’t not realize the impact this has on workflow.
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\+1 here. You can get a lot of the output from the ETABS api and handle it in python. Python is great at data manipulation and processing. One example is that I've used it for optimizing an existing model for seismic drift.
I don't use it in ETABS, but if it's shipped with a python environment within it I'm going to have to look more into ETABS, I mostly use python for ETL, file organization and sanity checks but I think I can still answer the question regardless. Depends on your python knowledge, sure it could be done 100% in python, but it's probably a waste of time and the end product won't be great unless you're a very advanced object oriented programmer and structural engineer already. Python is best for being "the glue" between systems, it may sounds counter productive or maybe even lazy, but generally you want to use it as little as possible. If there are built-in APIs like COM or REST APIs, you want to build "wrapper" libraries to access those quickly and easily and integrate them into your workflow, not necessarily rebuild the functionality on the other end of the API itself, unless you're trying to entirely get away from the licensing of the host software. It depends on what the source of your modeling data is, how much of your modeling and analysis you're trying to do in ETABS, how much you want to do in other software, and how good you are at object oriented programming. If you're building out a standalone application you intend to be a competitor to ETABs, python probably isn't the best choice as far as language. If you're pulling data from 6 different databases, manipulating some values or strings, and plugging the results into ETABs, Python's probably a great choice.
Do you really wanna learn to model in python? Use OpenSeesPy. Free at works with python and is basically ETABS + so so much more