Run AVEVA E3D Design in Batch

AVEVA E3D Design creates a separate Console process to manage the command-line input/output for all modules. When AVEVA E3D Design is invoked from a .bat file, processing of this file resumes as soon as you leave Monitor ‑ even though you are still using AVEVA E3D Design.

To help manage this situation, PDMSWait.exe is distributed as part of AVEVA E3D Design and can be used to make an AVEVA E3D Design script wait for AVEVA E3D Design to complete before continuing.

PDMSWait uses Windows facilities to wait for an event triggered by PDMSConsole when AVEVA E3D Design finishes. Because you can be running more than one AVEVA E3D Design session on any one computer, both PDMSWait and PDMSConsole look for an environment variable PDMS_CONSOLE_IDENTIFIER before doing this. You can set PDMS_CONSOLE_IDENTIFIER to any unique string. In a .bat file you can use the %RANDOM% or %TIME% values provided by Windows; in a Perl script, you can use the process number, accessible as $.

Example

set PDMS_CONSOLE_IDENTIFIER=%RANDOM%
call %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\E3D
call %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\pdmswait
echo Returned to .bat at %TIME%

This will start AVEVA E3D Design, then wait until it has finished before resuming the script.