LUSAS has always provided tools to enable software customisation. These made it possible to automate some of the more frequently performed modelling and analysis tasks.

Scripting is an important component of any system which is to be customised to provide a solution for a particular engineering discipline. A number of industry standard scripting languages have been implemented which enable data to be imported and exported to any ActiveX compliant program. This includes programs such as Excel, Access and Word and scripting languages such as Visual Basic Script and JScript. This provides extensive customisation opportunities with tools which are already familiar to engineers. The LUSAS scripting language enables customisation of the menus and tool bars and also has facilities to prompt the user for input via user defined dialogs.

A script file is an ASCII text file which is processed by LUSAS Modeller using the "File > Script >Run Script..." dialog (see LUSAS Modeller help). The format of the script file is as follows:

$ENGINE=scripting engine
{script body}
{procedures and functions}

Where the scripting engine is commonly either VBSCRIPT (Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition) and JSCRIPT (Microsoft Java Scripting Edition).

The LUSAS Modeller scripting API (Application Program Interface) is built around a set of core objects which an applications programmer can manipulate using specific methods. The current set of objects implemented for use within Modeller are given in the release documentation, together with a number of examples to help explain the use of each object/method. To find these pages search for "LUSAS Programmable Interface" (LPI) in the online help. Note that the examples may be cut and pasted into your own text editor from this documentation or found as text files in your installed LUSAS area under the sub directory \Programs\scripts\LPIExamples.

For those unfamiliar with Visual Basic the release kit contains a self extracting archive which contains a comprehensive list of all the functions available in the Visual Basic and Java scripting environment together with examples. This may be found in \Third Party\Scripting\VBScripting\vbsdoc.exe . Please also see the page Where do I Start With Visual Basic Scripting for LUSAS? in our Frequently Asked Questions area.  There are also a huge number of books on the subject. We would recommend books on "VB scripting" rather than "VB". The latter will include a lot of information pertinent to the the use of the VB Professional application - a lot of which is not available in the more simple VB scripting language.