Recipes

A recipe is a complete, runnable script for one structural-engineering task — not a snippet. Each one states its risk level, which product it's proven against, and whether that verification came from a live Gen NX/Civil NX session or just a mocked test, so you know what you're actually trusting before you run it against a real model.

Start with Getting started first if you haven't — these assume you already have midas-nx installed and a MAPI-Key.

Find your task

Organized the way a MIDAS Gen NX/Civil NX model actually gets built — model setup, then geometry, properties, boundary, loads, analysis, results. Every category below is real (it matches an actual midas_nx module and a real manual chapter), but not every category has a recipe yet. Where one doesn't exist, the entry below still links to the closest real material — Reference for the Python API, or ROADMAP.md for the full endpoint list — rather than leaving a dead end.

Task	Recipe	What it does	Reference / endpoint list
Model setup	Inspect a project — Level 1	Connect and print a one-screen summary of the current model	Client, DB resources — this recipe only checks the connection and counts nodes/elements; ch01/ch02 project-lifecycle itself has no recipe yet, see Document lifecycle
Nodes and elements	Read nodes and elements — Level 1	List and filter the model's geometry	DB resources, ch03 in ROADMAP.md
Materials and sections	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.properties.material, .section (the properties package itself has no exports — its classes live in these submodules), ch04 in ROADMAP.md
Groups and boundary conditions	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.project (groups), midas_nx.db.boundary, ch02/ch05 in ROADMAP.md
Static loads	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.static_loads, ch06 in ROADMAP.md
Dynamic and seismic loads	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.dynamic_loads, ch09 in ROADMAP.md
Temperature and moving loads	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.temperature_prestress, midas_nx.db.moving_loads (despite ch08's framing, most of its ~80 classes support both products — only 5 are gated Civil-only), ch07/ch08 in ROADMAP.md
Construction stages	none yet	—	midas_nx.db.construction_stage, ch10 in ROADMAP.md
Analysis	none yet	—	Document lifecycle (doc.analyze()), midas_nx.db.analysis_control, ch12 in ROADMAP.md
Results	Extract a result table — Level 1	Pull reaction forces out of an already-analyzed model	Post and result extraction, ch18-21 and ch23 in ROADMAP.md (ch22 doesn't exist — the manual jumps 21 to 23)

This table's module/chapter mapping is hand-maintained, not generated from docs/coverage.json the way ROADMAP.md is. If a future manual chapter renumbering or module split makes an entry above look wrong, docs/coverage.json and ROADMAP.md are the source of truth — please report the mismatch.

The three that exist are all read-only (risk level 1 — see Risk levels): none of them can create, change, or delete anything, so they're safe to run against a real model. Which of the none yet rows gets a recipe next depends on which of these three actually get used — see PLAN.md's Phase 8 note.

Recipe format

Every recipe follows the same structure so you can skim past what you already know: purpose, a pre-run checklist, inputs, the full code, what it does, expected output, how to verify the result, common errors, whether a timeout is safe to retry, and a prompt you can hand an AI assistant to adapt it. This mirrors the recipe standard in docs/planning/onboarding_plan_active.md.