pyfred

Python wrapper for Photon Engineering's FRED software

Description

pyfred provides pythonic bindings into a FRED document and a consistent API for using FRED through the win32 COM interface without having to worry about the nuances and quirks associated with the raw win32 API.

Some advantages this provides are:

• Use of familiar Python idioms for scripting
• Availability of a vast amount of mature python libraries
• Interactive access to your model using the powerful IPython shell
• Use of the Jupyter Notebook for documentation, reporting and workflow

Installation

pyfred is written and tested in Python 3.

pyfred has not yet been "packaged" so the installation process is completely manual. The following instructions provide some helpful guidelines but you will need to be well versed in your own specific python installation for troubleshooting purposes.

Downloading

Currently pyfred is only available through GitHub. Grab the latest version using

    $ git clone https://github.com/artdavis/pyfred

Alternatively, use a browser to navigate to https://github.com/artdavis/pyfred and use the "Clone or download" button to "download zip" and decompress into your folder of choice.

IMPORTANT: The cloned or unzipped package will have within it a subdirectory named pyfred. You should see python files in there like core.py, script00_verify_libraries.py and others. It is this directory which must be located inside of python's search path. For example, if you have a project directory in your PYTHONPATH called C:\Users\username\Documents\python you could put the pyfred directory there: C:\Users\username\Documents\python\pyfred. Test that it works:

    $ python -c 'import pyfred'

If there are no reported errors then the path is good. If you get a ModuleNotFoundError then you need to troubleshoot getting pyfred into python's search path.

Required libraries

pyfred requires some standard library add-ons: numpy, IPython, win32com, which will typically be available if you've installed Python from a pre-packaged distribution.

pyfred also requires PyYAML (http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAML).

Preferably install missing packages using your primary package manager assuming they're available there. Otherwise you may find and install them via pip.

The availability of the necessary libraries can be tested by running the included script00_verify_libraries.py. If this script runs with no errors you are in good shape to move on to the next step.

Building

pyfred must first build it's API from the FRED help file. It will look in the most logical places, but if it can't find it, or you have a specific version of a help file you want to use, you'll have to specify its location manually (in glovars.py set CHMAUTOLOCATE=False and specify the location of Fred.chm in CHMPATH).

Run the script0[1-4] files in order:

This first script decompiles the FRED help file for generating pyfred's API:

    $ python script01_winparse_chm.py

script02 creates the VBScript stub programs:

   $ python script02_stubgen.py

The third script wraps the FRED interface in python and creates pyfred's API:

    $ python script03_apiwrapgen.py

The fourth script will check that the API has been built and can be imported:

    $ python script04_confirm_import.py

Usage

Have a look through the files in the examples subdirectory.

First thing to try is to run examples\raw_create_doc.py. This launches FRED and creates a simple document with a plane element. This script only uses the raw COM interface (pyfred is not used at all). If FRED does not launch and create a document with a plane then python is not able to communicate with FRED and you've got some troubleshooting to do.

If that's working, next try running examples\core_pyfred_doc.py which will create a similar FRED document except it uses the pyfred API. It's also a good example for demonstrating the intended usage of pyfred.

Tutorial

There is a tutorial document that demonstrates various pyfred functionality in examples\jupyter_notebook_pyfred_tutorial. Ideally you would open the .ipynb version of the file in a Jupyter Notebook and interactively run through cell by cell. You may also read the non-interactive .pdf version of the tutorial as well.

License

pyfred is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

See LICENSE for details.

Disclaimer

pyfred is not affiliated with Photon Engineering LLC.