Product Focus from the PTC Technical Specialists E-Newsletter September 2010 Edition

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PTC Product Focus:  Pro/TOOLKIT: the Primary Customization and Automation Tool for Pro/ENGINEER

With the Pro/ENGINEER Toolkit API, companies can extend, automate, and customize a wide range of functionality from design through manufacturing.  Pro/TOOLKIT allows:

• Automating modeling for derived or single-use models driven by geometric or parametric constraints
  
• Monitoring the state of  user's interactive session to enforce company rules or offer design advice
  
• Integrating external applications requiring access to Pro/ENGINEER data or operations
  
• Extending the Pro/ENGINEER User Interface with custom processes seamlessly embedded into the interface
  
• Automating tedious or difficult Pro/ENGINEER operations with applications designed to save design time and prevent mistakes
  
• Creating processes to run automatically without user interface on demand or at designated times
  

Characteristics

• C library programming interface to Pro/ENGINEER
  
• Over 2500 functions
  
• 2 modes of communication
  
• Bi-directional data transfer between applications and Pro/ENGINEER
  

User requirements

• C programming skills, knowledge of pointers and data structures
  
• Development license to develop applications; applications may be unlocked and distributed within the enterprise without the Pro/TOOLKIT development license
  

Pro/TOOLKIT supports two types of applications:

• Synchronous
  • Applications invoked from commands within a running session of Pro/ENGINEER
    
  • Mode of communication may be:
    • DLL - fastest method
      
    • spawn (multiprocess) - slower, but offers more flexible link options
      
• Asynchronous
  
  • Applications running outside of Pro/ENGINEER that start or connect to one or more Pro/ENGINEER sessions
    
  • Communication is multiprocess
    

Architecture

DLL applications are loaded directly into the Pro/ENGINEER process space and IPC applications run as a separate process with inter-process communications passing parameters between the applications.

Pro/TOOLKIT application code can be invoked by

• Pro/ENGINEER startup
  • launched immediately upon registration of the Pro/TOOLKIT application
    
• User interface driven
  • invoked by user choosing application-created menu buttons and user interface components
    
• Event driven
  • invoked when certain events happen within Pro/ENGINEER
    
• Task driven
  • invoked by function calls from other external foreign applications
    

Examples

1.  Custom Pro/TOOLKIT user interface to automate repetitive or critical tasks

• model creation from templates
  
• geometry creation
  
• drawing creation
  

2.  Pro/TOOLKIT back-end to an interactive Pro/Web.Link web page in the embedded browser

3.  PTC’s ModelCHECK:

• Leveraging Pro/TOOLKIT functions to:
  
  • Enforce standards
    
  • Verify models
    
  • Assist repairs
    
  • Validate user modeling
    

4.  PTC’s Distributed Pro/BATCH:

• Includes Pro/TOOLKIT asynchronous applications as services that:
  
  • Generate an extensive set of EXPORT and IMPORT formats
    
  • Execute ModelCHECK
    
  • Plot and print models
    
  • Save models with display for preview in ProductView
    

Interoperability

Pro/E Wildfire allows Pro/TOOLKIT and J-Link programmers to create reusable task libraries.

• Library functions can take any combination and number of name-value pairs as input and output arguments.
  
• Library functions can be invoked by any other customization application
  

Pro/E Wildfire supports the common goal of “write once, use in any situation” for customization efforts.

Sample Libraries

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