Networking from Wherever You Are

One of the highest valued deliverables that COE provides the community of users of the wide range of Dassault technologies is the ability to bring peers together and network. This is not only at our conferences and workshops, but online at our website. Have you visited the COE website?

Don’t you have issues, concerns and/or questions that you would like to discuss with either your peers or the technology experts from Dassault or IBM. You are missing out on a fantastic opportunity if you have let this slip by.

CATIA V5 Programming

CATIA V5 Programming pertains to subjects that are highly technical and is unique in that it has spin-offs. For one, a Knowledge Based Engineering thread now handles specifics related to this upcoming technology. Too, there have been “Ask the Experts” presentations that came out of the discussions.

A recent presentation by Eric Bowman looked at CAA/RADE Basics which is one of the means for extending the capability of the CATIA v5 suite. Part of the discussion compares CAA/RADE with Visual Basic (VB). The following table provides a comparison of the two techniques.

The left column identifies characteristics that ought to be considered when development object-oriented code. One of the trades involved in this type of activity concerns how well the underlying access to CATIA (API – application programming interface) is handled. In this case, what we see is that VB is preferred from ease of use and GUI but is more constrained in how it can access CATIA than we find with CAA/RADE. However, the latter is much more difficult.

Eric suggested a combination. For instance, specific API exposures (making what CAA/RADE can see available to VB) relate to domains (they are not generally definable in many cases). Therefore, local modifications may be required to support an organization’s process. Writing sufficient CAA/RADE to handle the communication between CATIA V5 and VB would then allow VB’s use for handling the business rules.

This type of discussion will be an on-going affair. The Forum has proven itself to be capable for supporting the demand.

COE Forum FAQ

Last month, Ian Phillips discussed FAQs and their history. His overview included a link to further reading. FAQs help handle common questions. They also are a means to build a community’s spirit.

Craig Helm made a recent stab at starting the first COE FAQ and produced a nice starting point for subsequent additions. A listing of the COE FAQ and its accompanying files can be accessed on the FAQ thread.

Ian suggested a method to track Forum discussions that will be added to the FAQ.

The Forum’s “search” facility can be used to get a report on this type of activity.

When searching the Forum, remember to set the Category switch. For the FAQ, the following setting (equivalent to “select all”) is necessary to find all items.