Hello!
I am new to ISM, and am experimenting with it as a central repository for Prostructures design and STAAD Engineering data. It seems to work at first attempt, but I am having an issue with materials. It seems that the mapping of materials from Prostructures to STAAD is not configured by default. When I set a material in Prostructures, STAAD seems to have issues with it.
Additionally, when I leave material undefined in Prostructures, then set one in STAAD, I get a dialog like below asking me to map the material.
Where can this list and also the mapping of these items between Prostructures and STAAD be modified? I saw a post referring to an ISMMAPPING text file in the Prostructures installation file under DATA, but no such file exists. Any help is appreciated..
Thanks!
Jesse
Yes, we put quite a bit of effort into this workflow (for both applications) in the current development cycle. We also posted some best practices that can help (also requires the upcoming versions though)
communities.bentley.com/.../modeling-and-node-generation-best-practices.aspx
Understood..
Thanks for your reply Seth. So I should expect better integration with ISM with the next releases of Prostrucures and STAAD?
I've been working with pre-release versions of ProStructures SS6 and STAAD.pro SS5 for so long I forgot they were not live yet. That is probably the difference. Those versions should be out fairly soon though.
It's also possible that the mapping file does not exist until the first time you map a material through the ProStructures interface.
Answer Verified By: jwolfe
Well the Prostructures material was making it over to STAAD from ISM, only it didn't seem that STAAD understood it, so we changed to undefined material in Prostructures thinking that might help. However, once we assigned a material in STAAD and sent it back to Prostructures via ISM, it seemed that Prostructures was unable to understand the value from STAAD. This is where we received the error message above.
I read your article, what is confusing me is that the text file you mention for Prostructures (ISMMAPPING??) doesn't seem to exist anywhere on our machines. Is that a Microstation thing (we are using Prostructures for AutoCAD)?? Or and SS6 release item??
There has to be some option to map the materials back and forth right??
I wrote a short wiki about mappings here, it might help you:
communities.bentley.com/.../prostructures-ism-section-and-material-mapping.aspx
But since ProStructures does not store specific material properties and does not assign them to the ISM repository, some properties will have to be defined or a new material assigned in STAAD.pro typically.