If you locate on the internet any website that shows Pro/TOOLKIT code,
please let me know. Until then, what you can find here is the
only oasis in the desert. It contains some of the code fragments that I have written in
the past years. I will be adding more
when time permits. They will be given in
a trimmed form for obvious proprietary reasons. Nevertheless, the
code will contain enough to educate those of you who are just starting to
work with Pro/TOOLKIT.
I don't have a sense of the size of the community that
uses this product, but I suspect that it is fairly small.
Nevertheless, I expect that those of us who are involved with writing
Pro/TOOLKIT functions should benefit from the information presented here.
Since 1998 I have done a number of projects that
are novel in their usage of Pro/TOOLKIT. Therefore, besides
regular toolkit functions, I will include the discussion about these
excursions as well.
Various Pro/TOOLKIT functions ...
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Highlight edges that have a radius smaller than some critical
radius. The need to do that arises in sheet metal applications
where smaller radii in bands are not desirable. The usual way of
going about things like this is to visit all the surfaces on the part,
then all of the contours on each surface and finally all of the edges on
the contours. This is what you can find in the Pro/TOOLKIT guide.
However, the drawback of that approach is that you visit all the edges
twice. To avoid this my approach given
here is to visit all of the features on the part and then visit all geomitems to extract geometrical information. |
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In my opinion working with Pro/TOOLKIT menus is a
bit difficult. A newcomer must plan a serious allocation of time for
this. Here
is a simple example for practice. |
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"Notification" process is a bit wordy in
Pro/TOOLKIT user guide and sample code is not easy to decipher because
it is a part of a large application. I think that a simple example
where it is easy to see how things need to be done is more beneficial.
I believe in an inductive way of learning so
here is one example. |
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How to create a Windows DLL with Pro/TOOLKIT code in
it and use it with Visual Basic? This is not supported
by PTC, but it can be done. At least one Pro/TOOLKIT function
doesn't work which is ProEngineerStart(), but you can connect to Pro/E
with ProEngineerConnect().
Here is a simple example. |
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Selection process may get involved sometimes.
There are a lot of parameters that one needs to think about. To
get you started here
is a simple function that lets a user select edges on a part and then
returns the total length of edges selected. |
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A number of new user experience a lot of problems
initially with setting up Pro/TOOLKIT projects in MS Visual Studio.
Therefore, for a long time I wanted to provided template projects which can be used without spending
hours of setting up compiler switches that work with toolkit libraries.
Here
you can find 2 VC++.NET projects that can be built without
problems. |
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This article is designed to get newcomers started in
understanding and using Pro/TOOLKIT. It was published in
www.caddigest.com and you can read it
here. |
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In Pro/TOOLKIT documentation there are no examples
how to use UDF functions, so
here is an article to fill this gap. |
