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SCIA Engineer Optimizer is an external application and the optimization process is running “outside” SCIA Engineer. We need to transfer the necessary information between these two applications. Format XML (Extensible Markup Language) is used for this task.
SCIA Engineer has a tool for creating XML documents in a similar way as the basic SCIA Engineer output document. Go to Tools > XML IO Document and a new window appears.
If you open the XML document for the first time, an option to open the Document template in *.TDX format appears. You can skip this if you don’t have any XML template. Hit Cancel button.
Two documents have to be created for each project - one with input parameters and second one with output parameters. These two documents differ in their content which is described below.
The input document has to include the table of parameters only. Click on the New button on the top left corner and select Parameters table from the Libraries group.
The output document consists of more tables, namely the Bill of material (because mass optimization is the basic task) and Checks of steel (because we want to design the structure as well).
Click the button with three dots at the top and insert a new document.
Click on the New button in the top left corner and add the desired tables:
Bill of material from the Results group
Check of steel from the Steel group (this has to be input twice – for each cross-section)
Below you can see the settings for each table included in the document. Note that the check of steel is filtered by cross-section and the first and the second item differ in this setting only.
Refresh the document to see if all the data are correctly loaded and close the window by the red cross in the top right corner.
It is wise to type a name of both documents so that they could be better recognized later. “IN” and “OUT” is the simplest possibility and it works well.