The ACT Start Page provides a central place from which to access the many tools that ACT provides for developing, debugging, and executing extensions. From here, you can access the ACT Console, which exposes the ACT APIs. As a novice, you can discover APIs and write small and simple scripts for automating routine tasks that you perform within an Ansys product. As your experience and confidence grows, you can write full-fledged extensions that customize and extend Ansys products.

The Extension Manager provides for installing and loading extensions. The Wizards launcher starts simulation wizards, and the binary extension builder creates compiled binary files from scripted extensions. With tools like the ACT App Builder, ACT Debugger, and ACT Workflow Designer, modifying existing Ansys functionalities and adding new custom functionalities and workflows is easy, giving you the power to decide how Ansys products should look and behave.

ACT also provides a full set of supporting resources to help you with app development. The ACT documentation includes comprehensive feature overviews and detailed API descriptions. To aid you in development efforts, ACT supplies comprehensive examples for various types of Ansys product customizations, all of which are designed to help you to understand how to use ACT to develop apps. For instance, you can easily modify supplied examples to align them with your own simulation vision, saving you both development time and money. Written and tested on supported Windows and Linux platforms, these examples are packaged for download from the help panel on the ACT Start Page. Additionally, on the App Developer Resources page, the Help & Support tab displays a link for downloading the examples.

The Ansys training course for ACT covers using ACT and its APIs to customize Workbench, Mechanical/Meshing, and DesignModeler. After completing this course, you should be able to automate the creation of standard tree objects in Mechanical/Meshing, create custom loads and results in Mechanical, create custom objects in DesignModeler, and create wizards in Workbench or its integrated modules.