Calling AIMMS from Python with academic license

@rhserna21 

Are you receiving any specific error message when you try this code ? 

1. What happens when you execute the code you have in command, directly in Windows cmd ? If this executes successfully, you’ll know that it is not an issue with your license.
2. Did you try subprocess.run instead of subprocess.call ? To my knowledge, subprocess.call does not support arguments.

@rhserna21 

You are correct that AimmsCmd does not work with the new licensing scheme for Academic Licenses and the Community License. These new types of licenses deliberately do not allow running headless AIMMS sessions, as would be the case with AimmsCmd. 

However, we will shortly be releasing a new version of the DataExchange library which will allow procedures in AIMMS models to be run through a REST API. This will form the basis for running AIMMS models through a REST API from our cloud platform later this year, but this functionality will also allow you to access interactive AIMMS sessions on your desktop from e.g. Python. Such a setup will also enable debugging such REST calls, e.g. to figure out possible data problems in your input from Python.

Thank you Marcel for your reply!

@rhserna21 , procedures have an annotation attribute (under the comments field) where you can specify this. 

To start the HTTP service enabling you to connect with the model from Python, you need to call

 dex::api::StartAPIService

from within your model which uses 

 dex::api::ListenerPort

to specify the listen port (default 8080). So, if you didn't make any changes away from the default port, you can then reach the service at the URL

http://localhost:8080/api/v1/tasks/{service-name}

Hey @premkrishnan612!

There a few topics on how to use python, did you already read these? 

If it still did not work for you, can you send us an email at support@aimms.com with your project for us to understand what is the problem? 

Let me know if it helped!

Hello @premkrishnan612 

I strongly recommend reading the following section of the documentation to dive a little deeper into the workings of the Rest API capabilities:

https://documentation.aimms.com/dataexchange/rest.html#providing-rest-apis

On the 403 error:

A POST request to the URL will either return the status code 403 Forbidden if the service name cannot be found.

I made a simple example, to share with you:

1. I created a procedure named pr_stopStartApi that stops and then starts again the API service (I did not change anything else, so the port is 8080)

Procedure pr_startRestApi {
    Body: {
        dex::api::StopAPIService;
        dex::api::StartAPIService;
    }
}

2. I created a procedure named pr_updateName that has the dex::ServiceName newName, hence is my available service/task.

Procedure pr_updateName {
    Body: {
        sp_requestParameters(dex::api::reqpar) := dex::api::RequestParameter(dex::api::reqpar);
        if "newName" in dex::api::RequestPars then 
            sp_name := sp_requestParameters('newName');
        endif;
    }
    dex::ServiceName: newName;
}

Note: the procedure: read all parameters in a request into a string parameter, checks if the newName parameter was sent in the request, if so, updates the string parameter sp_name with that new String.

3. Add a declaration with the used string parameters

DeclarationSection __unnamed {
    StringParameter sp_requestParameters {
        IndexDomain: dex::api::reqpar;
    }
    StringParameter sp_name;
}
 

Note: sp_requestParameters is indexed on dex::api::reqpar. This is necessary to capture all request parameters passed to the service.

Here is print of the project:

My test was succesful:

1. Ran pr_stopStartApi
2. Sent a post request - http://localhost:8080/api/v1/tasks/newName?newName=AIMMS

   

3. After which my sp_name string parameter was correctly updated with the string AIMMS

Hope this helps.