A Great Programming Reference Site in 3ds.com

On the COE forum, there are inevitably many questions about all facets of Catia, but today, we will focus on "How do I get my start in programming in Catia?" or "Where can I get information on XXX?" Other than going out and buying a Visual Basic book (here on out just VB), or a VBScript book, there is 3ds.com. This is a website that is of great worth for everyone from the non-programmer new to Catia to the most expert programming users. You can also find out what is new on the horizon for Catia from their ENOVIA database and its siblings to their new 3DXML for quick and easy collaboration. The best thing about this site is that it is free. The only “catch” is that you are supposed to have a Catia license to register, but if you don’t have a license, you hopefully aren’t doing any programming in Catia anyway.

Two ways to get to where you need to be on the 3ds site are as follows:

1. Follow this link - http://www.3ds.com/alliances/developers-tools/
2. Follow these steps.
1. Go to www.3ds.com
2. Click Alliances in the top bar between Education and News and Events
3. Click Automation Developers at the bottom of the left hand pane
4. Enter your username and password (All you have to do is register)
5. Click documentation
6. After a new window opens, then select the version that you are using
1. As of the writing of this article, versions 12 thru 15 are available with their last respective service packs
7. From here, we can do a number of different things

The picture below shows all the different sections that you can go to. This will be the most important part to people new to programming or just new to programming in Catia. From here, you can go to the specific category that you want to research and find examples, technical articles, or the references for that area.

You can also go to their FAQ to see if one of the problems that you are having might be a common one. There are quite a few gotchas that have gotten most, if not all of us at one time or another when we get an error and we just "shouldn't be getting it!"

You can also go to the reference manual. From here you can go to the Catia frameworks, object hierarchies (if you are new to programming, it’s ok if you don’t know what this is), or the Indexes.

In the frameworks section, you can pick a specific area that you need help in. I personally use this one the most for drafting. Let’s say you want to learn how to make a piece of text on your drawing. Go to DraftingIntefaces, DrawingText. Once you program for a bit you will know that DrawingTexts comes above DrawingText in the tree for when you actually write your code. You will also know that you will need a document, a sheet, and a view object to get to the texts object.

The object hierarchy is very large and hard to sift through, and I have found little use for it. If I am searching for an object, I will go to it and do a find for it. But, if you know this much about it, you can usually do this through the VBE (Visual Basic Editor) just as easily.

Finally the Indexes. From here you can choose the master index to see everything, deprecated index to see what you can’t use anymore, or the interface, property, method, enum, and typedef indices to see their respective types. To explain all of these would take too long and is not in the scope of this article. The master, method, and properties are about the only ones that most people will use. From here, you can just select the letter that you want to see, or do a find (Ctrl-F) and look for something in general. This area is very big so you will likely get a lot of hits, and it also will take a bit to load everything, so be wary of this if you find returns nothing. Everything probably just isn’t loaded yet.

Some words of experience to anyone new to programming. First, use the VBA editor (VBE) through Catia and not a WordPad text type editor for one of the scripting languages (unless you are on Unix in which case you have to use BASIC script). This will make you life MUCH easier, and it is much more powerful. MOST VBA code will copy and paste straight to a text document and can be saved as VBScript and will work. While writing code in the VBE, you can position you cursor on one of the words in your code and hit F1. This will take you directly to that particular object, method, or property in the help documentation. It also has intellisense and autocompletion which will give you an on the fly list of what you can use and complete the word when a period, a space, or return is hit. Also, search the Coe forum (http://coe.org/forums/) and their FAQS. If you still need help, ask a question.

Craig Helm
craig.e.helm@boeing.com