Using COBIA interface on Linux

[checkel]

Hi everybody!

I am developing a CAPE-OPEN interface for Dymola to use property data calculated from external property packages in my system simulations. For this I use the COBIA interface, which works great.

So far my Dymola interface only works on Windows, but I would like to extend it for use on Linux. But I haven't found any information on how to get started. Is there a separate SDK for development on Linux? Is there more information about this topic available somewhere?

[jasper]

Although COBIA works find on linux, some minor details (such as where is the registry stored, currently this would be exclusively in ~/.COBIA), there is no official CO-LaN release yet. The only part that is really needed from the SDK to develop against is the include folder - the include files work for both linux and Windows, so you can for now just compile against the Windows header files. The one difference between coding for linux and Windows is that COBIA strings are represented by UTF-8 on all platforms but Windows, but UTF-16 on Windows. So when you use strings and you want then to compile on both linux and Windows, you could e.g. use std::basic_string<COBIACharacter>, and string constants are best wrapped in the COBIATEXT macro, e.g. COBIATEXT("hello"), which evalutes to L"hello" if _WIN32 is defined, or "hello" otherwise.

You can at the moment compile COBIA on linux yourself, provided you are CO-LaN member and have been given access to the source code; cmake will set things up for you and also take care of installing the files to the right location (currently only for the current user on Linux).

[checkel]

Thank you for your reply! That was very helpful.

[jasper]

Most welcome. For COBIA we need to prioritize development in the directions where current business cases lie. If you have a business case for CO-LaN releasing COBIA on linux, please let CO-LaN know about it