What can I do with the Abaqus GUI Toolkit?

You can use the Abaqus GUI Toolkit to customize Abaqus products.

There are many ways to customize Abaqus products.

  • User subroutines allow you to change the way Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit compute analysis results. Information on user subroutines can be found in the Abaqus User Subroutines Guide.

  • Environment files allow you to change various default settings. Information on environment files can be found in the Abaqus Execution Guide.

  • Kernel scripts allow you to create new functions to perform modeling or postprocessing tasks. Information on kernel scripts can be found in the Abaqus Scripting User's Guide.

  • GUI scripts allow you to create new graphical user interfaces. GUI scripts are described in this guide.

The Abaqus GUI Toolkit provides programming routines that allow you to create or modify components of the GUI. The toolkit allows you to do the following:

  • Create a new GUI module. A GUI module is a grouping of similar functionality, such as the Part module in Abaqus/CAE.

  • Create a new GUI toolset. A GUI toolset is similar to a GUI module in that it groups similar functionality, but it generally contains more specific functionality that may be used by one or more GUI modules. The Datum tools in Abaqus/CAE are an example of a GUI toolset.

  • Create new dialog boxes. The Abaqus GUI Toolkit provides a full library of widgets from which you can construct your own dialog boxes. However, the Abaqus GUI Toolkit is not designed to allow you to modify existing Abaqus/CAE dialog boxes.

  • Remove Abaqus/CAE GUI modules and toolsets. You can choose which GUI modules to include in your application and which GUI modules to leave out. For example, the Abaqus/Viewer application does not include the modeling-related GUI modules; it contains only the Visualization module.

  • Remove some top-level menus or some items in those top-level menus. For example, you could remove the entire top-level Viewport menu to prevent users from manipulating viewports, or you could remove the Import and Export menu items from the File menu.

  • Perform limited changes to Abaqus/CAE GUI modules and toolsets. For more information, see Modifying and accessing Abaqus/CAE GUI modules and toolsets.

The Abaqus GUI Toolkit is not designed to run outside of Abaqus/CAE; it must be used with Abaqus/CAE in order for the infrastructure to function properly.