The 3D ACIS® Modeler (ACIS) is Spatial’s prominent 3D solid modeling engine. 3D InterOp is a CAD data translation framework (Interoperability)
InterOp:Connect
From DocR19
InterOp Connect is an improved user interface for the Spatial Interoperability components. This interface provides simple and flexible data translation through a common interface. Some of the important features of InterOp Connect interface are:
- An easy-to-use interface, which enables a developer to learn the system quickly and to use it efficiently.
- Interface consistency between data formats, which enables a developer to rapidly add new data formats to an application.
- Improved product stability.
Connect provides an object-oriented interface to translate between popular standard and proprietary CAD data formats. This interface can be used to translate one CAD file to another format (file to file) or can be used to read a CAD file directly into an ACIS or Parasolid-enabled application (Reader). For many formats, an interface is also provided to write a CAD format file directly from an ACIS or Parasolid-enabled application (Writer).
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Concepts
InterOp Connect provides an object-oriented interface to perform translation between various file formats. Connect provides the functionality to translate files, configure translation options, and extract information from a file, independent of the file format. The ability to configure options before translating a file enables you to customize the translation process.
The primary translation mode is file-based. However, for an ACIS or Parasolid document, a special derived version of the document class, SPAIDocument, is provided. This allows you to perform a translation directly from the model data contained in memory.
InterOp Connect is based on the concept of "documents" and "options", defined below:
Document
A document is essentially a CAD data container, for example a CATIA V5 or Pro/Engineer part or assembly. Connect simplifies data translation into a process of translating a source document into a destination document. Source documents can be either an ACIS or Parasolid entity list (for in-process Writer) or any of the supported Reader file formats. Corresponding destination documents can also be either an ACIS or Parasolid entity list (for in-process Reader) or any of the supported Writer file formats.
Options
Options allow you to control what data to translate and how to translate the data. For example, using options, you can control the translation of a specific attribute. You can specify whether an attribute should be translated or not. InterOp Connect defines a set of common options that allow you to control the translation of common properties. In addition, InterOp Connect also provides a set of format-specific options that are applicable to specific formats only.
Theory
The Connect interface allows you to manage the InterOp data translation process. The interface logically connects the source and the target documents and controls the translation process through a defined set of options. The new Connect interface is simple, easy to use, and efficient. A simple data translation process using the Connect interface is described below in steps:
- Create a source document
- Create a target document
- Set the appropriate options
- Translate
Architecture
The following Architecture diagram depicts various components involved in the translation process and their interaction with InterOp Connect.
User Application
This is an application that requires InterOperability functionality. The user application interacts with the Spatial InterOp components through the InterOp API to implement the translation functionality. For a typical file-to-file translation, the user application links with SPAXBase and SPAXInterop libraries for translation support.
InterOp API
The InterOp API layer exposes the common interface used by the user application to set up all translation parameters and options.
Connect Core Translation Module
The Connect core translation module consists of the implementations for common functionality of InterOp. The translation module manages the translation engine and defines the internal InterOp interface for the InterOp components to translate data from one format to another. Depending on the translation requirement, the format-specific shared libraries, delivered with InterOp, are dynamically loaded by the translation engine. As a result, support for additional formats in the user application can be gained simply by adding the necessary libraries, without modifying the application's source code.
InterOp Components
A component is a combination of several shared libraries. InterOp defines a separate component for each supported data format. A component uses the standard private Connect interface to manage the communication with the data formats. While translating between two different file formats, the format-specific components communicate through the Core Translation Module.
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ACIS-based User Application
Each ACIS-enabled user application interacts with the ACIS entities stored in memory rather than through files.
The user application may directly use its entities when the ACIS component, SPAXAcisBase and SPAXAcisKernel has been specified to implement the Document API. Thus, the user application must be linked to the SPAXAcisBase and SPAXAcisKernel components to enable the functionality provided by the specified implementation.
Parasolid-based User Application
Each Parasolid-enabled user application interacts with the Parasolid entities stored in memory rather than through files.
The user application may directly use its entities when the Parasolid component, SPAXGeneric has been specified to implement the Document API. Thus, the user application must be linked to the SPAXGeneric component to enable the functionality provided by the specified implementation.
