There are several routines that you can use with the command prompt to make using HEC-FDA a little easier. These routines are described here. In this tutorial, we walk you through setting up your computer to use these routines and we provide an example of using one of the routines.
Set up your machine to recognize commands
We need to add the location of the HEC-FDA software to the "Path" user environment variable. When you do this and then type a command in the command prompt, your machine will look in the HEC-FDA software directory for the command you want to use.
Step 1
In the search bar, type "environment" and select "Edit environment variables for your account." A window should open that looks like the window in the image below.
Step 2
Select the "Path" variable under "User variables for user-name" and click Edit. Add the location of the HEC-FDA software on your machine as in the image below. The location of HEC-FDA Version 1.4.3 software should be "C:\Program Files (x86)\HEC\HEC-FDA\1.4.3". Click OK to save the edit, and click OK to exit the environment variables window.
Run a command
One of the most useful commands is results dump. This command tells the computer to write computed results out to multiple tab delimited text files which can be opened with Excel and formatted for reports.
Step 1
Open the command prompt by typing "command" in the search bar and selecting the command prompt. Change the working directory to the location of your study on your machine in double quotation marks, as in the first line in the image below. The location is the location of your .sty file. The command we use is "cd" which tells the computer to change directory. Hit enter. You should see a second line appear that begins with the complete directory of your study.
Step 2
After you have evaluated your plans by analysis year and calculated average annual equivalent damage, we can write the computed results to text files. In the command prompt, write HecFda_v143_resultsDump "study name here" as in the image below. Be sure to write your study name where we have written "study name here," and include your study name in double quotation marks. Our study name is BearWS5 so we will write the following in the command prompt: HecFda_v143_resultsDump "BearWS5".
Step 3
As the results are dumped, you will see in the command prompt a list of the results that are dumped. If something went wrong, you will see the message "Failure to get results!" in which case you should check that all results have been computed successfully. When you see the line "Closing Study studyNameHere" in the command prompt, the routine is finished. You can now navigate to the study folder within the working directory and find the Fda_results.... text files, as in the image below.
Step 4
Open Excel, navigate to the study directory folder, and select the file you wish to open. Be sure to change the type of file to "All Files (*.*)" from the drop-down box in the lower right-hand side to view all files in the study directory folder. Using the Text Import Wizard to convert the text to columns in Excel, select the delimited file type, hit Finish, and enjoy reviewing your results in Excel.