Introduction
The Python API (application programming interface) was introduced in VE 2017. An API in its simplest terms is a mechanism for one software program to communicate with another software program. The VE Python API allows users create simple programs using the Python Programming Language, to interact with a VE Model and/or Vista Results File. This gives users the option to automate many of the repetitive tasks, which up to now would have been relatively tedious. The VE Python API will allow users to create simple python programs, to automatically:
- Extract specific information from a VE Model or Vista Results file,
- Perform some calculations on the data if desired,
- Arrange the data into a standard format,
- Write the data to another program such as Microsoft Excel or Word.
Some simple examples of this would include:
- Extracting air temperatures for a group of rooms from the Vista Results File, performing a range test to determine the percentage of annual occupied hours that each room is above 28oC and then writing this data to an excel sheet.
- Extracting room data (internal gains, ventilation rates, etc.) for a group of rooms from the building template manager, collating this data into a table and then writing it to an excel sheet.
- Extracting location and climate data from the weather file that is assigned to a model and writing it to a word file.
