How do I get the Location property from the object.Properties list?

From what I've been able to tell, generally, the APIName of a property in an object's object.Properties list corresponds to the name used to access that property directly from the object. In other words, to get the value of the property from a given index of object.Properties, this should work: getattr(object, object.Properties[index].APIName).

As an example, for a named selection, the second item in the object.Properties list shows up as GeometrySelection when you execute object.Properties[1], and 'Location' is returned when you execute object.Properties[1].APIName. So, object.Location is equivalent to getattr(object, object.Properties[1].APIName). This can be useful since it allows the entirety of the properties for a given object to be obtained by the script without having to know ahead of time the means of getting a specific property.

However, there is at least one instance where this is not the case. For the "Optimization Region" of a "Structural Optimization" simulation, object.DesignRegionLocation returns the scoped geometry for the region. However, the item that corresponds to that property is the third item from the object.Properties list, and the APIName is empty. As far as I can tell, there is no means of identifying the DesignRegionLocation from the object.Properties list. Am I missing something?

Find more posts tagged with

AnsysACT

Mechanical

IronPython

Structures

Accepted answers

All comments

Landon Mitchell Kanner

Hi @tlewis3348. This sounds like a bug, but I could not reproduce it in 2024R1. Here are some screenshots:

tlewis3348

Well, that's a little embarrassing. I've been using this code to grab all the properties for the object:

prop_dict = {}
for prop in obj.Properties:
    if prop.Visible and prop.APIName and not prop.ReadOnly:
        api_nm = prop.APIName
        if prop.APIName in obs_typs_dict:
            api_nm = obs_typs_dict[prop.APIName]
        val = getattr(obj, api_nm)
        if hasattr(val, "DataModelObjectCategory"):
            val = ("ans_obj:"
                   + str(val.DataModelObjectCategory)
                   + ":" + val.Name)
        prop_dict[api_nm] = str(val)

It doesn't record the DesignRegionLocation in the dictionary, and I thought it was because the prop.APIName was None, but I thought that because I was looking at obj.Properties[2] (whose prop.APIName is rightly None) rather than obj.Properties[1]. The actual reason for DesignRegionLocation not being recorded to the dictionary is due to the fact that obj.Properties[1].VisibleisFalse`, even though it can be seen in the UI.

Landon Mitchell Kanner

I have filed Bug 1117027
Interestingly obj.DesignRegionLocation.Visible returns True

tlewis3348

So, maybe a more robust means of getting the Visible (and, for that matter, ReadOnly) property would be to use this: getattr(obj, api_nm).Visible (or getattr(obj, api_nm).ReadOnly). In other words, use the getattr() function to get the property and then check the desired Visible and ReadOnly properties.

Landon Mitchell Kanner

Hi @tlewis3348 , I discussed with our Software Development team. The challenge is that internally there are two properties: GeometrySelection and ComponentSelection, but there is only one API: DesignRegionLocation.

Starting at 25.1, both GeometrySelection and ComponentSelection will list DesignRegionLocation as the APIName:

Prior to 25.1:

25.1 and beyond: