The pylife-odbserver package

pylife-odbserver

A server for odbAccess to be accessed by pylife-odbclient

Purpose

Unfortunately Abaqus usually comes with an outdated python engine. So you can’t access an Abaqus odb file from within modern python code using the latest packages. This python package is the client part of a client server setup to make odb files accessible from within python code using a current python version in a transparent way.

Solution

This package provides a slim server that as python software that is running with old python versions of Abaqus (even 2.7), that can be run inside the Abaqus python engine. It accepts command via sys.stdin and according to the command is querying data from the odbAccess interface and returning them in a pickle object.

The sibling package pylife-odbclient comes with a python class OdbClient that spawns the server in the background when an instance of OdbClient is instantiated. Then the client object can be used to transparently access data from the odb file via the server. Once the client object goes out of scope i.e. is deleted, the server process is stopped automatically.

Installation

Create and activate a plain python-2.7 environment without additional packages. For example by
```
conda create -n odbserver python=2.7 pip
```
Instead of 2.7 you must choose the python version of your abaqus version. You can find it out using
```
abaqus python --version
```
Run
```
pip install pylife-odbserver
```
Set environment variables (optional)

The odbclient will look for your Abaqus binary in
- C:/Program Files/SIMULIA/<release_year>/EstProducts/win_b64/code/bin/SMALauncher.exe
and for the above Python environment in:
- <repo_root>/.venv-odbserver
- C:/Users/<yourname>/.conda/envs/odbserver
- C:/Users/<yourname>/.virtualenvs/odbserver
If your paths are different, you must either specify them each time you run the odbclient, or you can set them as environment variables as follows:
```
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("ODBSERVER_ABAQUS_BIN", "<absolute/path/to/your/abq.exe>", "User")
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("ODBSERVER_PYTHON_ENV_PATH", "<absolute/path/to/the/above/python/env>", "User")
```
You can check the above with:
```
[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("ODBSERVER_ABAQUS_BIN", "User")
[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("ODBSERVER_PYTHON_ENV_PATH", "User")
```
See the instructions in pylife-odbclient on how to install the client.