Automatic interface to uff in pyEMA

[nilswagner]

An automatic interface to uff in pyEMA would be appreciated.
Until now you always need a second module, i.e. pyuff to import .unv/.uff files.
The different license types of pyEMA (MIT license) and pyuff (part of OpenMODAL (GPL)) make this difficult sometimes.

[jankoslavic]

Dear @nilswagner This sounds like a good idea. Could you please elaborate a little more what functionality would you need. Maybe present a use case...

[nilswagner]

I currently have three application scenarios in mind.
pyEMA offers a method (tools.py) to compute the MAC matrix. Therefore pyEMA should support datasets 15, 55, 82, 2411, 2412.
The second feature is the mode complexity #25 (polar plot visualization of complex modes and computation of MCF).
The third application is the mode estimation from FRFs. That means that we need a feature to import FRFs (dataset 58).

[klemengit]

Since the main task of pyEMA is to extract modal parameters from the FRFs, I think that it doesn't need the automatic importing/exporting from/to .uff. pyEMA is not meant to be an all-in-one application, but a building block for the user to include in the program. pyuff can therefore be used to import and export the data.

That being said, I do agree that the connectivity between pyEMA and pyuff should be improved.
Usage examples could be included in showcase and documentation. pyEMA could prepare the data to be saved in the .uff (dictionary); however, the user should use pyuff to save the data. When importing from .uff, a supporting function could be added to pyEMA to extract arguments for pyEMA.Model() from the pyuff.UFF() object.