Getting started

PyDynamicReporting supports Ansys Dynamic Reporting 2023 R2 and later. To run PyDynamicReporting, you must have either a local copy of an Ansys installation with a product that uses Ansys Dynamic Reporting or use a Docker image.

To get a copy of Ansys, visit the Ansys website.

Note

Up to the Ansys 2023 R2 release, Ansys Dynamic Reporting is installed as part of the Ansys EnSight package, under the Fluids section of the installer. Starting from the Ansys 2024 R1 release, Ansys Dynamic Reporting is installed separately, and can be found in the Fluids section of the Ansys installer. Please also note that in all versions, Ansys Dynamic Reporting is automatically installed if one of the following Ansys products is installed: EnSight, Forte, Fluent, Polyflow, or Icepack.

Installation

The ansys-dynamicreporting-core package currently supports Python 3.9 through Python 3.12 on Windows and Linux.

To install the latest package from GitHub, run this command:

pip install ansys-dynamicreporting-core

If you plan on doing local development of PyDynamicReporting, install the latest pydynamicreporting package with this code:

git clone https://github.com/ansys/pydynamicreporting.git
cd pydynamicreporting
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv venv  # create virtual environment. If on Windows, use virtualenv.exe venv
source venv/bin/activate # If on Windows, use  .\venv\Scripts\activate
pip install .[dev]  # install dependencies
make install-dev  # install pydynamicreporting in editable mode

Now you can start developing the pydynamicreporting package.

Create an Ansys Dynamic Reporting instance

Once PyDynamicReporting is installed, your first step is to create an Ansys Dynamic Reporting object. There are two ways to do this, based on whether or not there is a local Ansys installation.

If there is a local installation, simply point to the version directory inside the Ansys installation:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(ansys_installation=r"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v232")

If there is no local installation, you must direct PyDynamicReporting to download (if not already available) and run a Docker image:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(ansys_installation="docker", data_directory=r"C:\tmp\docker")

The data_directory parameter must pass a temporary directory that has to exist and be empty. This directory stores temporary information from the Docker image.

Start and connect to an Ansys Dynamic Reporting service

Once an Ansys Dynamic Reporting instance is created, you can start an Ansys Dynamic Reporting service or connect to a running one.

To connect to a running service, run this code:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(ansys_installation=r"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v232")
ret = adr_service.connect()

The preceding code assumes that there is a running Ansys Dynamic Reporting service on your machine on port 8000 with the default username and password. If the Ansys Dynamic Reporting service does not use the default values for the URL, port, and login credentials, you must provide the appropriate values in the connect method:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(ansys_installation=r"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v232")
ret = adr_service.connect(
    url="my_machine:8010", username="MyUsername", password="MyPassword"
)

Note

When you are connecting to a running Ansys Dynamic Reporting service, the web components that you obtain from PyDynamicReporting might or might not be embedded. This is controlled by how the Ansys Dynamic Reporting service was started. To ensure that web components can be embedded, you must start the Ansys Dynamic Reporting service with iframes enabled via this flag:

--allow_iframe_embedding

If you are using PyDnamicReporting to start the Ansys Dynamic Reporting service, you do not need to take any action because iframes are enabled by default. For more information on the launcher in Ansys Dynamic Reporting, see the Ansys Dynamic Reporting documentation.

Now, assume that you do not have a running Ansys Dynamic Reporting service accessible to you and that you must start one. You can use this simple start method:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(
    ansys_installation=r"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v232",
    db_directory=r"D:\tmp\db_directory",
)
session_guid = adr_service.start(create_db=True)

The adr_service object is now connected to a newly started Ansys Dynamic Reporting service on a new database. Once again, you can control the parameters of the Ansys Dynamic Reporting service (port number, username, and password) by passing them as arguments:

import ansys.dynamicreporting.core as adr

adr_service = adr.Service(
    ansys_installation=r"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v232",
    db_directory=r"D:\tmp\db_directory",
    port=8010,
)
session_guid = adr_service.start(create_db=True, username="MyUser", password="abcd")