Solid Edge ST3 SAT Export Problem

I am getting a weird error when I try and export an ACIS SAT file from Solid Edge ST3. This happens on all the Solid Edge ST3 installations in my office. The export begins and then the progress bar freezes at about 10%. This happens for any model in Solid Edge. In this case I created a simple box and tried to export it to SAT.

As you can see the progress dialog does not have a Cancel button. So there is no way of aborting the export. I have raised an incident at GTAC regarding this and will update this post with the solution when I have it.

But in the meanwhile, if any of you are  facing the same problem you may be tempted to go to Task Manager and kill Edge.exe, the Solid Edge application executable. There is no need to do that. You may unnecessarily lose any work that you may not have saved. Solid Edge internally calls an executable called SEAcisTrans.exe to perform the SAT translation. Look for it in the Task Manager and kill it.

You will get a message saying that the translation failed and Solid Edge along with your work will stay intact.

Data translation can sometimes be quite unpredictable due to a host of unknown factors what may become involved in the process. In times like these, to get a better understanding of what may be happening it can help if you turn on logging. After selecting SAT as your export file type, click the Options button. That will pop up the Export options for ACIS SAT. Check the box titled “Generate log file”

Doing this will replace the progress dialog box shown above with a more useful one which logs events as they happen.

As you can see the translation has failed, but the Finish button is not enabled for me to click and return to Solid Edge. I guess SEAcisTrans.exe is hung up on something and hasn’t yet passed control to Edge.exe or whichever DLL that called it. I’m not sure but I get the feeling that SEAcisTrans.exe is stuck at trying to stop the modeler.

If any of you know of a solution to this problem of know what’s going on, please leave a comment. FYI, I am running Solid Edge ST3 on Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit).

Update (8-Nov-2010)

Siemens PLM has converted my incident report into a problem report with a priority code of 1 (Critical). So I guess they were able to reproduce this problem at their end.

Update (17-Dec-2010)

Siemens PM appears to have fixed this problem in Maintenance Pack 1. See “Solid Edge ST3 SAT Export Problem Fixed“.