How can I promote imported connections to remote points in Mechanical?

Jimmy He

I have a model with many imported connections (read from an external FE input file), how can I edit them and promote them to remote points in Mechanical via scripting?

Jimmy He

There can be two types of connections: rigid (RBE2) and deformable (RBE3), the APIs to edit and promote them to remote point are slightly different.

For rigid connections, the table in Mechanical looks like the following:

To edit the reference node ID and promote to remote point, one can use the following:

# Rigid connectors
obj = DataModel.GetObjectsByName('Rigid Remote Connectors(External Model)')[0]
n_rows = obj.Count
for r in range( 1,n_rows+1 ):
    row = obj.GetObject(r)
    # Modify reference node ID
    row.SetPropertyValue('ReferenceNodeId',1)
    # Promote to remote point
    obj.Promote([r],1)

For deformable connections, the table in Mechanical looks like this:

To edit the reference node ID and promote to remote point, one can use the following:

# Deformable connectors
obj = DataModel.GetObjectsByName('Flexible Remote Connectors(External Model)')[0]
n_rows = obj.Count
for i , row in enumerate( obj ):
    # Modify reference node
    row.SetPropertyValue('ReferenceNode',1)

    # Promote to remote point
    obj.Promote([i+1],1)

Note the slight differences in the property name and syntax in both cases.