There are 2 supported mechanisms for using the Geosoft GX API in an external application. The first (default) mechanism relies on an existing installation of Geosoft Desktop Applications being installed on the system. The second mechanism requires the installation and setup of a redistributable package. Each is described in a separate section below.
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Applications that use this mechanism requires either Geosoft Viewer or Oasis montaj installed. A handful of thin wrapper dlls need to be placed next to your application binaries. These dlls take care of the redirection of API calls to the desktop platform where the functionality is implemented. The versioned redist dlls are available in the GeosoftInc/gxcore Github repository.
The API is serviced from the application via a number of small wrapper dlls. Under normal circumstances this is all that should be needed for the system to work. The default "Core" Geosoft registry keys (under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Geosoft) will be read to detect the location of the application binaries. If not a geosoft.key text file can be placed next to the dlls. This file should contain a single line containing the alternative registry key. Usually this will be done to target a Geosoft Beta or Pre-Release instance.
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- No geosoft.key file should be placed in the folder, only the wrapper dlls and the
GeosoftRedistfolder. - Inside the
GeosoftRedistfolder a text file called geosoft.redist needs to be created that contains 2 separate lines with writable folder paths. The first line should point to a location that can be used as the user folder for the instance and the second as the temporary folder. - When an external application initializes the GX API context with this system in place the following should occur:
- The wrapper dlls should discover the
GeosoftRedistfolder automatically. It will read the geosoft.redist file an obtain the 2 paths, creating them if they do not exist. If anything goes wrong during this step a UI error message is displayed and the process will display an error message box, then exit. - The normal GX context initialization will occur, i.e.:
- A Geosoft Connect connection is established (installing Geosoft Connect automatically if not present) and a signed-in Geosoft Seequent ID is required in the same way as is true for our currently release GX API context initialization.
- The user folders and resources are created and refreshed in the same way as for Geosoft Desktop installations.
- The wrapper dlls should discover the
At this point any GX API that the signed-in Geosoft Seequent ID is entitled to via a Desktop Applications install should be available. There are two standalone redistributable packages available (9.7 8 release packages can be found here).
- Minimal - This contains a minimal set of binaries to support read and writing Geosoft formats, but also a large portion of the core algorithms (depending on entitlement) etc. This distribution does not contain any third-party format support, GX binaries or any UI mechanisms.
- Full - This is basically a full Oasis montaj package (except for anything that requires the 32-bit interop layer like ER Mapper, ArcGIS ArcEngine etc.). Even the montaj application binaries can be found and run (subject to Geosoft Seequent ID entitlement) from the bin directory. There are methods in the gxpy Python APIs that use these as document viewers.
Standalone Use via GXPY
In version 9.6 the standalone gxpy Python setup.py mechanism was changed (compared to the 9.5 mechanisms). Instead of using the 'python setup.py install' mechanism to embed the redistributables they can be installed externally and the paths can be configured at runtime via new parameters passed to the gxpy.gx.GXpy constructor: