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Skills

Innexis Ae Headless

Skill innexis-ae-headless. Drive Innexis Architect Explorer 2026.1 headless from the command line - the AE_Engine CLI contract, the working-directory trap that silently deletes your project, the schema-resolution rule that makes a valid model report "syntax is invalid", and what each stage {validate, compile, build, run, analyze, all} actually needs. Use for any Innexis AE automation, batch validation, or "AE says my model is invalid" investigation.

Innexis AE 2026.1 installs at D:\Innexis_AE and is four products in one tree: a Mentor CodeBench 13.11 Eclipse, Eclipse Capella 6.0.0, the AE analysis engine (native exes), a VirtualPlatform (VisualElite/SystemC), and a VSI slice. The analysis engine is not an Eclipse plugin. Nothing in the 1,958-plugin Eclipse is named innexis.

Where licensing and toolchain environment is defined

⚠ Do not restate the environment here. The authority is se-process-skills/demos/jpo-f35/stage7-innexis-vsi/run_ae.sh and its README.md, which established, EXERCISED:

  • licensing goes through MGLS, never SALT (MGLS_LICENSE_FILE), and
  • MGLS_HOME must point at D:\Innexis_AE\VirtualPlatform\mgls or the 32-bit v2_model_builder cannot find salt_mgls32.dll and dies with Cannot checkout license: 105179,
  • plus the four MSVC variables the VP compiler front end shells out to.

Two copies of that environment WILL drift. Source it from run_ae.sh or read that README. This skill covers only the engine contract and its traps.

The CLI

AE_Engine.exe -wd <working-dir> -xml <model.xml> [-v N] {validate|compile|build|run|analyze|all}

at D:\Innexis_AE\SystemExplorer\Automation_Engine\wnt64\. AE_Engine.exe is a thin launcher: it sets INNEXIS_DEVPRO_HOME / VISTA_HOME and re-execs Ae_Backend.exe with the same arguments. Default verbosity is 5.

A clean validate prints a tree and exits 0:

├── Environment Manager   └── Environment Initialization finished successfully
├── License Manager       └── License checked-out successfully
├── Input Manager
│   ├── InputAdaptor      └── Validation against schema finished successfully
│   ├── InputValidator    ├── Simulation Time / Sender-Receiver Interfaces /
│   │                     │   Software Components / SWC Custom Behaviors /
│   │                     │   Prebuilt Applications / Network Topology /
│   │                     │   Hardware / Hw-Sw mappings / Analysis Enable
│   │                     └── Logical validation finished Successfully
│   └── InputTranslator   └── System Configuration translation finished successfully
└── Innexis Architect Explorer finished successfully

The licence feature checked out is VelSysExplorer. A license_log.txt and a system_<timestamp>.log are written into the working directory on every run.

⚠⚠ Trap 1: -wd is a scratch directory and the engine CLEARS it

Pointing -wd at a folder containing a project deleted all 8 files in it (.capella, .aird, .sysml, .xml, .png, .afm, readme.txt, properties.json), leaving only the two log files. Confirmed twice: by listing the directory afterwards, and by the next run reporting the XML "doesn't exist" at a path it had read successfully seconds earlier.

⇒ -wd must be an empty scratch directory, and -xml must point OUTSIDE it.

mkdir -p "$WD"
AE_Engine.exe -wd "$(cygpath -w "$WD")" -xml "$(cygpath -w "$SRC")" "$STAGE"

Never aim -wd at anything you want to keep. This is survivable only if you always run against a copy. The shipped tutorials under SystemExplorer\Tutorials\ are easy to destroy this way.

⚠⚠ Trap 2: the XSD must sit NEXT TO the XML, and the error names the wrong cause

An AE model declares xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="AE_XSD_schema.xsd", resolved relative to the XML file. The schema ships at SystemExplorer\config\XSD_Schema\AE_XSD_schema.xsd and is NOT in the tutorial folders. Without it:

[ERROR] TERMINATING: Input XML syntax is invalid

The syntax was fine. The schema was missing. Copy AE_XSD_schema.xsd beside the model before validating. Verified in both directions: fails without, passes with.

Stage semantics

validate runs with no MSVC toolchain configured and still exits 0: it only does schema validation, logical validation and translation. The four MSVS_* / MSSDK_* warnings print on every invocation regardless of stage and are not fatal for validate.

compile / build / run / analyze compile a SystemC virtual platform and genuinely need the toolchain and MGLS environment above.

⇒ validate is the cheap gate. It is the right acceptance test for any generator that emits AE XML: it is fast, needs no toolchain, and returns a real exit code with a named failure stage.

Reading a failure

The engine prints the failing stage in the tree, and [ERROR] TERMINATING: <reason>. Trust the stage name, not the reason text: "Input XML syntax is invalid" has at least two causes (genuinely malformed XML, and the missing-schema case above).

Exit code 1 with Error: Ae_Backend.exe execution failed with code 1 is the wrapper reporting the backend's status, not a separate fault.

Other executables in the tree

Path What it does
SystemExplorer\Automation_Engine\wnt64\Ae_Backend.exe the real engine; AE_Engine.exe wraps it
VSI\Automation_Engine\wnt64\VsiUiEngine.exe VSI slice bundled inside AE
SystemExplorer\utilities\wnt64\Export_CSV\CapellaParser.exe -print, -text FILE, -csv FILE over a .capella
SystemExplorer\utilities\wnt64\GenerateUML\UMLGenerator.exe UML diagram from an AE XML
SystemExplorer\utilities\wnt64\Export_SysMl\{capella_to_sysmlv2,sysmlv2_to_capella}.exe see innexis-ae-model-xml

Launching the IDE (not headless)

SystemExplorer\utilities\wnt64\Start-AE-IDE.bat, as Administrator. It elevates in order to mklink /D C:\Users\AE_User -> %USERPROFILE%, because AE has a hardcoded C:\Users\AE_User path. This is also the documented workaround for "IDE fails to launch if the username contains special characters".

⚠ eclipsec.exe in codebench\eclipse raises a modal GUI dialog on error even in console mode, so an unattended run can appear to hang. Background it and treat a long silence as blocked, not slow. It also needs -vm D:/Innexis_AE/codebench/jre/bin/java.exe passed explicitly, because there is no jre beside the launcher. See capella-headless-authoring.

Related

  • innexis-ae-model-xml for the AR-PACKAGE schema the engine consumes.
  • capella-headless-authoring for scripting the Capella half.
  • diagnose-silent-failure for the general discipline. Both traps above are that shape: a destructive operation and a misleading error, each reporting something other than what happened.

Generated from skills/innexis-ae-headless/SKILL.md in the tc-automation-skills library, which is the canonical copy and also serves as the agent skill set for Teamcenter work.