Is the Exo-6 report utility broken with Nastran 2018?

I have found the MSC Exo-6 report utility to be very helpful over the last several years since it came out in 2012. It still seems to work fine with all versions up to and including 2017. But it crashes when I try to open an f06 file from version 2018. I wonder what in the 2018 f06 file could have broken this very valuable tool.

Also, I have been using your other report writer called F06_Reader that is distributed with the 2017 version. That tool works fine for the 2017 version but always seems to crash with the 2018 version.

Do you have any reporting tool that works with version 2018?

0 Don.Graff over 6 years ago

Hi Toby,

I came across this with a customer not too long ago... there is an article on it here:

simcompanion.mscsoftware.com/.../index

This is what it says:

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The f06 reader was dropped from 2019.0 but was available until v2018.1. Here is the path for it:

C:\MSC.Software\MSC_Nastran\20180\msc20180\win64i8\F06Reader.exe

C:\MSC.Software\MSC_Nastran\20181\msc20181\win64i8\F06Reader.exe

This version will work with Nastran v2018.0, 2018.1 and v2019.0, but will NOT work with v2018.2.

We had to remove F06reader from standard Nastran installation because of some vulnerabilities associated with the Python 2.5 version that the F06reader is based on. Moving forward we may be able to make it available as a standalone installer but we haven’t made that decision yet.

-----------------------------------

Regards,

Don
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0 toby.t.norris over 6 years ago

Hi Don,

Thanks for that information. Sounds like the short answer is that MSC has decided to eliminate this valuable tool because of some problem with python 2.5. That is a real dissapointment for me. So now instead of getting a nice easy to read html report from each run we are back to only having the wonderful f06 file to look at. I guess that is progress. Maybe version 2020 will go back to requiring punch cards for the bdf file.
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0 LJuillen over 6 years ago

Hello,

@Don Graff : Why for 2018.2 it is not working and it does for v2019.0 ? .F06 file format changed ? or it is only related to associated python version installed files ?
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0 Don.Graff over 6 years ago

I am glad you asked that question... I played around with this, and was having it work sometimes and not others... I asked development and they isolated the problem. It is actually in the .log file. Here is a 'working' .log last line:

MSC Nastran finished Fri May 24 09:28:22 EDT 2019

Here is the failing v2018.2 last line:

MSC Nastran finished c:\msc.software\msc_nastran\20182\msc20182\win64i8\mscdate

The workaround is to delete this last line in the .log file entirely and then the f06 reader seems to work! I'll update the article discussing this.
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0 LJuillen over 6 years ago

Many Thanks Don for the info !

Glad to see that sometimes "butterfly effect" works... : "one small question from a user...one giant (?) leap for MSC community !" ;-)

Best regards.
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0 toby.t.norris over 6 years ago

Hi Don. That log file change looked hopeful. Unfortunately it does not work for me . When I removed the last line in the log file I still get a crash of the F06 reader program with the attached error message. I also attached my f06 and log file in case you can find the problem.

Also, I really prefer the exo-6 program that used to work great. It is much faster and can easily be setup to run automatically after each run with the post option in the *.rcf file. Also, it makes convergence plots and worked well for my SOL 400 runs. Is the exo-6 program dead at MSC, and if so can you please release the source code some that someone like me can fix it and get it working with Version 2018? Thanks.

Attached Files (1)
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0 toby.t.norris over 6 years ago

Here is my f06 file

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abis2a_nom.f06.zip
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0 toby.t.norris over 6 years ago

And here is the corresponding log file with the last line deleted

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abis2a_nom.log
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0 toby.t.norris over 6 years ago

Hi Don. I finally got the F06 Reader tool to work with the f06 and log file that I uploaded earlier. The only problem was that my path was too long. My files were located with many directory layers above, and the overall path was apparently too long for the reader to handle. Once I moved the files to a directory closer to the top, then the Reader worked fine. Perhaps your programmer can increase the string size for the file paths. Thanks.
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0 Don.Graff over 6 years ago

I'm glad you got that to work! By the way, the Exo-6 should work with the edited log file... that was what I was talking about earlier...
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