The following video will take you on a quick tour of the most important updates regarding extensions, API (Application Programming Interface) commands and our HWC (HyperWorks Command) language. The coming paragraphs will give you a quick overview of each topic, but if you are in a rush, please feel free to jump straight to the video and click ‘play’.
Extensions now support all HyperWorks clients, which means you can expose your automation routines as custom ribbons or toolbars in HyperMesh, HyperView, HyperGraph, MotionView… Depending on your requirement, extensions can be developed for each client separately or you can package everything together in a single extension.
Using extensions, you can create your own contexts (guide bars with selectors, options menu, microdialogs, etc.) and link them to your Tcl scripts. All this is possible thanks to the new context API commands. Apart from providing the necessary glue between your business logic and a custom context, the new commands allow you to interact with the core HyperWorks contexts as well.
From the customization perspective, the ability to programmatically work with the core contexts is crucial with respect to the panel removal strategy. As the legacy panels are being discontinued, the panel API commands will be deprecated at the same time. Any script that is automatically posting a panel today, will have to be updated to enter a corresponding context instead.
Although creating custom contexts is very straight forward due to their low-code definition via XML files, not every custom solution requires setting them up. Especially in case of post-processing workflows, automating the necessary tasks can be done extremely efficiently in a linear fashion using the Command Record & Playback (HWC). In HyperWorks 2022.1, HWC language covers up to 85 % of HyperView functionalities and almost half of the HyperGraph features. The live demonstration in the video recording will show you how complex operations can be automated using as little as a single line of code.