Accessing cam path through API

[andradrr]

Hi people.

Please, is there any way to read a CAM operation generated path through API?

To be more clear, what I want to do is to read (cycle through) every generated point coordinate inside a CAM path through an API function.

I just neeed to know (if is there any) which function do this. I've tried to find it within UG documentation but I got no success.

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

[markrief]

I would output a CLS File, and then read the text.

Mark Rief
Product Manager
Siemens PLM

 

[andradrr]

Hi markrief!

First of all, thank you for your reply.

I already do this, but it is very slow for my needs.

In order for you fully understand, I'm making a NX/OPEN application to generate a very taylored shop-doc like process sheet to distribute it in our tooling shop using TOTVS WebDesk application.

What I want to do (reading the CAM path) is to determine the lowest Z coordinate the tool reach on a given toolpath.

Today I achieve this outputing the toolpath to a CLS with the option CLSF_DOC. The third line of this output is the lowest Z coordinate for that toolpath.

The problem is that, this method takes too long to process due the size of the toolpath. The NC program output is about 100 mb.

I'm using a DELL Precision T3500 with a Xeon 3.2 (8 cores), 8Gb ram, SAS 15K disks and it still takes several minutes to generate each document using the CLS output, and I have thousands of documents to generate.

So I thought that if I could parse the tool path myself it would be much faster than using the CLS output method because I would not make any kind of extra operation.

Again thanks a lot any help!

Rodrigo.