How to grab a material and adjust it from CSX?

[EngGhaith]

Hi!
Let us consider the case from MW tutorial:

For some purpose I want to grab this material and change its properties (actually adding magnetic loss to a material in a pre-defined stack), without adding any extra material.
How to do this?

[VolkerMuehlhaus]

I need to add something: @EngGhaith uses my RFIC workflow that creates materials and geometry objects, and then return FDTD and CSX only. The material instances created inside my Python library are not available (not exposed) in his top level code.

So the question is: if we have FDTD and CSX instances, can we somehow get access to the materials defined there? In this specific case, he wants to add magnetic loss to a material that was defined before by my library code.

[thliebig]

Have a look at the python API doc
The are method like "GetAllProperties" or "GetPropertiesByName" for CSXCAD to get the properties. And there are similar method to get the primitives from the properties.
And of course all the properties have interface method to e.g. change the material definitions like SetMaterialProperty and so on and so forth.
I hope this is what you were looking for.

[VolkerMuehlhaus]

The are method like "GetAllProperties" or "GetPropertiesByName" for CSXCAD to get the properties. And there are similar method to get the primitives from the properties.

Hi Thorsten,
I spent quite a while on the API docs before telling @EngGhaith to open a discussion here, but didn't really understand what a "property" is in this context. So it was (and still is) hard to understand how to apply that function to perform the query for the material where we have the name, but not the instance.

Is the material a property and we use CSX.GetPropertiesByName('copper') to acess the existing Material instance named 'copper', or how to use this? All help is much appreciated!

Volker

[VolkerMuehlhaus]

Thanks again @thliebig
I used debugger to just try this and it works. Lessons learned: each Material is a property of CSX.

@EngGhaith
Below is the code to set "sigma=123" for material "TopMetal2":

    CSX = FDTD.GetCSX()
    materials_definitions = CSX.GetPropertiesByName('TopMetal2')
    if len(materials_definitions)==1:
        material = materials_definitions[0]
        material.SetMaterialProperty(sigma=123)

[thliebig]

Well the main CSXCAD python API page gives a good overview? So yes, the CSProperties.CSPropMaterial is a material property for example. But also lumped elements, an excitation or a dumpbox are properties. They all should contain one or more primitive to give it a location in 3D space as well.
This combination of properties containing primives (e.g. box) are what make up a CSXCAD structure.

[VolkerMuehlhaus]

Well the main CSXCAD python API page gives a good overview?

I guess it's crystal clear to the author of those texts, but for me that API ref has been frustrating whenever I tried to look up something except the straight ContinuousStructure.xxx() functions. Shame on me!