Profile Names

The Advance Steel API requires profile names to be formatted a certain way.

When creating elements or changing the profile assigned to an element, you may want to assign a specific section profile, rather than a default profile. To generate a string with the correct format, follow these steps.

To access the correct profile class name and section size, you will need to browse the Advance Steel profiles database. There are two ways to do this:

1. Start Advance Steel Management Tools (a separate application installed with Advance Steel)
   1. Select "Table editor"
   2. Click "Open Database"
   3. Browse to "C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Advance\Data" (or similar)
   4. Select "AstorProfiles20xx.mdb" (where 20xx represents the version number such as 2016) and click Open.
2. Open the same AstorProfiles20xx.mdb with Microsoft Access or any other compatible database editor.

After opening the profiles database, open the "ProfileMasterTable" table which describes all the available profiles types and the tables in which all the sizes for each profile can be found.

1. Look in the TypeNameText column for the profile class name (i.e. "AISC 14.1 W Shape")
2. Look for the TableName in the same row. (i.e. "EXT_AISC14_W_Shapes")
3. Open the table with that name
4. Look in the SectionName column for the desired section size (i.e. "W10x12")

The profile name to use when creating a new element or assigning the profile name for an existing element will be the a concatenation of the profile class name (from 1), a fixed string separator "#@§@#", and the section size (from 4). For example "AISC 14.1 W Shape#@§@#W10x12".