The pylife-odbclient package

pylife-odbclient

A Modern Python client for odbAccess using pylife-odbserver

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Unfortunately Abaqus usually comes with an outdated python engine.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

The sibling package pylife-odbserver 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.

This package 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

  • Install the odbclient using pip with the command

pip install pylife-odbclient

Usage

Usually you only will see the OdbClient class interface when you access an odb file. The only point you care about the server is when you instantiate an OdbClient object. You need to know the following things

  • The path to the Abaqus executable

  • The path to the python environment pylife-server is installed into.

Then you can instantiate a OdbClient object using

import odbclient as CL

client = CL.OdbClient("yourodb.odb")

See the API docs of OdbClient for details.

Limitations

Limited functionality

Only a subset of Abaqus variable locations are supported. These are: nodal, element nodal, whole element and centroid. Integration point variables are extrapolated to element nodal.

You can only extract data from an odb file, not write to it.

String literals

So far only names made of ascii strings are supported. That means that instance names, node that names and the like containing non-ascii characters like German umlauts will not work.

Development

Due to the server client architechture running the unit tests is not completely trivial. Here are some instructions on how to get them running.

Setting up the environments

As of now, we are assuming that conda is used to setup the server environments. Probably we will change for uv in the future.

We provide a bash script in tests/create_server_envs.sh that you can run from within the root folder of odbclient (the folder this README.md resides in). Then it should generate all the necessary environments. You will have to run the script again, if there has been a release update in between.

The script is not well tested. So please be prepared for some manual steps.

API docs