By choosing the Analysis toggle located on the Patran main form, an Analysis form will appear.

Selecting Read Results as the Action on the Analysis form allows you to read results data into the Patran database from a text (“jobname”.fin) or binary (“jobname”.fil) ABAQUS results file, or to access ABAQUS results directly from an ABAQUS results output database (“jobname”.odb). Other forms that are accessible from here are used to define translation parameters and select the ABAQUS results file. These forms are described on the following pages.

Since the ABAQUS DRA in Patran is integrated with the ABAQUS 6.3-1 libraries, you must make sure your ODB results files have been upgraded to 6.3 before attempting to attach to them from within Patran. This can be done in one of two ways:

The procedure for upgrading ODB files is part of ABAQUS:

   abaqus upgrade job=job-name odb=old-odb-file-name

If you want to automatically upgrade your older ODB results files, you can set the following
environment variable:

Setenv ABAQUS_DRA_UPGRADE_ODB=YES 

By setting this variable, Patran will make a copy of the ODB results file and upgrade the copy to the current version of ABAQUS.

Read Results defines the type of data to be read from the analysis code results file into Patran. The Object box may only be set to Results Entities.

In some cases, the translation will not be able to write the data directly into the Patran database. In those cases, a text file will be created containing all the instructions as to how this data is to be loaded into the database. This file can be transferred between computers if necessary, then read into the proper database using the File Import functionality. The full functionality of this form is described in Working with Files (p. 45) in the Patran Reference Manual.