Solid Edge ST8 SDK
Solid Edge ST3 - What's New
| What's New > Solid Edge ST3 - What's New |
Solid Edge ST introduced new type libraries to implement automation for Synchronous document types. In ST3, all Synchronous methods and properties have been merged into the Traditional automation objects and removed.
The data model in ST3 combines the Traditional and Synchronous models into one Part or Sheetmetal document. The Synchronous specific APIs for Part and Sheetmetal documents no longer exist and have been superseded by the Traditional document APIs. The intent of this design is to mimic that as closely as possible in terms of the automation data model, but without negatively impacting existing users of Traditional automation.
Programs that were written using the Solid Edge programmable API to specifically service Synchronous assembly, part and sheet metal documents will no longer work in ST3 since these document types no longer exist. In ST3, Synchronous document and Traditional document types have combined to form the integrated document type. Programs that service Traditional document type in ST2 and prior releases will work with no modification against the integrated document type. Some modifications may be needed to address the Synchronous node of the integrated Part and Sheetmetal documents.
Beginning with ST4, API type libraries will be modified to remove references to the no-longer-required Synchronous document types and any programs using these types will fail to compile.
In ST3 Part and SheetMetal documents, users can switch between Synchronous and Ordered modeling environments. In order to provide this functionality through automation in ST3, a new document property named PartDocument.ModelingMode and SheetMetalDocument.ModelingMode have been added which can be used to get and set the current modeling mode. The valid values for this property are defined in the ModelingModeConstants Enumeration.
Users must ensure they are in the correct modeling mode when calling Part and SheetMetal APIs in ST3 since the behavior and/or results of calling some APIs will be affected by the current modeling mode. For instance, if the current modeling mode is seModelingModeSynchronous, then methods like ExtrudedProtrusions.AddFinite will create a Synchronous feature, but if the current mode is seModelingModeOrdered, an Ordered feature will be created.
With the integrated modeling environment in ST3, Model objects can contain both Synchronous and Ordered features. To distinguish between these features, a new read-only property has been added called ModelingModeType. For example, if a Model contains a Synchronous Extruded Protrusion and an Ordered Extruded Protrusion, iterating over the Model.ExtrudedProtrusions collection will return both Synchronous and Ordered elements. To distinguish between them, you can now check the ExtrudedProtrusion.ModelingModeType property. The list of possible types are declared in SolidEdgePart.ModelingModeConstants.
It should also be mentioned that calling methods\properties that are not appropriate for a given ModelingModeType will return E_INVALID_MODELING_MODE. An example of a property used in Ordered but not appropriate for Synchronous is the read/write property Suppress. The get/set methods will be modified to check if the object's ModelingModeType is seModelingModeSynchronous and, if so, return E_INVALID_MODELING_MODE.
When the API for ST/ST2 was developed, some Synchronous methods were implemented with different parameters than their Ordered counterparts. Since we cannot modify existing API signatures, it was decided to copy the Synchronous APIs to the Part type library and append the word "Sync" to the API name in the case of collisions.