Selecting an element/node by its Id, how to find which body the element/node corresponds to?

amusthaf

I have an element id, but I need the body to which the element corresponds to.

In general, I have a named selection with all the elements of a body. I need to find out to which body the elements correspond to in the assembly.

Pernelle Marone-Hitz

Hi @amusthaf ,

The below script should help:

element_ns = ExtAPI.DataModel.GetObjectsByName('NS_Elements')[0] 
first_element_id = element_ns.Location.Ids[0]


mesh_data = ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Analyses[0].MeshData


bodies = ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Geometry.GetChildren(DataModelObjectCategory.Body, True)
for body in bodies:
    geobody = body.GetGeoBody()
    mesh_for_body = mesh_data.MeshRegionById(geobody.Id)
    if first_element_id in mesh_for_body.ElementIds:
        print('Element ' + str(first_element_id) + ' is in body named: ' + str(body.Name))

This is NS_Elements:

This is the geometry structure:

And the script returns:

Which we can verify as follows:

Ben Klinkhammer

Hi @Pernelle Marone-Hitz
This looks great and I can confirm it works well if I have an Analysis system.
That said, I am running in stand-alone Mechanical and haven't attached an Analysis system yet so when I first try it If I do something like:

mesh_data = ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Analyses[0].MeshData

I get

Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection.

Attaching an analysis system works around the problem but thought I should see if there is any other approach that doesn't require the Analysis to be defined?

Thanks,
Ben

Pernelle Marone-Hitz

Hi @Ben Klinkhammer , in that situation, you can grab MeshData in another way:
mesh_data = ExtAPI.DataModel.MeshDataByName('Global')
This should work.