Hi Community,
Is anybody else working on or thinking about developing a Speckle link with SCIA / SAF / ADM?
I am in any case, so I thought to throw the question out there to avoid parallel work. Since SCIA as far as I know doesn’t allow us to create an add-in for the software, it is currently limited to a converter that can be used in other code to easily go from Speckle to ADM and back.
Any thoughts or comments? I’m happy to discuss!
Happy coding!
Kelvin
I am not aware of other efforts on SCIA / SAF / ADM, would be amazing to add a new connector to our family 
!!
Thanks for the tag @JdB
I also believe that the approach you describe is probably the best way to go currently. SCIA is working on an API, but what I heard is that it’s not very useful so far.
Within our company we have our own Python package to setup structural models and convert these to .xml format that can be read by SCIA. You could follow a similar approach, where you fetch a Speckle stream with the specklepy client, and then convert this to .xml format (or ADM (?), not so familiar with this format), so it can be imported by SCIA. In backward direction it can of course work in similar way. I guess it could also work using C#, although I’m less familiar with that.
Hope that helps!
Hi @Rob,
Thanks for the feedback. SCIA is indeed developing an API, and ADM (i.e. their object model) is sort of a part of it. I’m using it for the converter, even though ADM is still under development and less complete than XML, it will be the new way of doing things. I’m developing in C# to be able to use the Speckle object model and an easy link for Grasshopper.
Sounds good!
At some point we would also like to switch to the API, but we’re waiting for a bit more maturity there. Would be nice to hear about your progress!
Hi @kelvin,
How are these developments going?
Seems that SCIA has indeed massively improved their C# API (SCIA Engineer OpenAPI documentation, for those interested). Heard they’re also working on a Python API, which I believe will be a Python wrapper around their C# API. Didn’t have a deep dive myself yet, but thought it was definitely worth mentioning in this topic 
Hi @Rob,
The developments were frozen for some time as indeed we ran against limitations that were blocking progress. Instead, we’ve been continuing with the XML/Koala approach.
I also heard that SCIA has been working hard on improving the API and ADM for version 22, and I’m hoping to free up some time soon to dive into it. Once I do, I’ll try to upgrade the Speckle converter and put it on Github for anyone who might be interested.
I’ll keep you posted 
Kelvin
Hi @Rob,
FYI, I’ve pushed the SCIA converter that I’ve been working on to this speckle-sharp fork on Github.
I haven’t seen much improvement in their OpenAPI in the 22.0 version. They’re current focus is on expanding the ADM and developing the third party connector, which should replace the OpenAPI if I understood correctly.
I you have any news, or comments on the WiP converter, I’d be happy to hear it!
Sorry for the late reply @kelvin, but you did a massive amount of work, impressive!
We are currently checking out the Python API, to see if we can connect to Scia from there. We will need to check if Scia is indeed planning on replacing it, as this isn’t something we were aware of. If it’s really the case, we might need to change plans.
Thanks for the tag!
In addition, I verified with a colleague who had contact with Scia before. As I believe you’re Belgian, this code snippet should be fine for you 
For non-Dutch-speakers, essence is that the OpenAPI will indeed be replaced by their new Third Party API. We’ve contacted them to get some more details, on API changes and to get an estimation on the time until deprecation of the OpenAPI. For more information, consider to learn Dutch 
Hello, are there any news on the discussion with Scia?
A connector with SCIA Engineer would be useful for structural analysis exchanges.
No news from our end unfortunately. This category does now have a voting session (next to the title) - so do use it! PS: Maybe @Rob and/or @kelvin (who has done work already in this direction!) have updates to share.
No news, will probably wait for SCIA 23 version to see how their API has improved and whether this allows to go further with the converter/connector.
