Running HEC-RAS from Visual Basic 6 and Excel VBA

HEC-RAS is free a software by the Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) at the US Army Corp of Engineers which allows you to perform one-dimensional steady flow, unsteady flow, sediment transport/mobile bed computations, and water temperature modeling. Recently I needed to run HEC-RAS from my custom software and interact with the data and results. An example use would be making batch HEC-RAS runs with different parameters. At the HEC-RAS web-site I could not find any information about running the software as a server or from the command line. Searching around I found the Italian site of RUWA Ltd. with a link to a utility named RasClient (available for download at the bottom of this page).

The RasClient utility cames with a Visual Basic 6 source code example, Excel demo file and a Word document. The document seems to be written by Mark Jensen who is, according to the HEC-RAS user manual, is the programmer of the user interface and graphics of HEC-RAS. So I guess the RasClient utility is by HEC. The document states that “HEC-RAS is compiled as a server application and can be called from another program that supports ActiveX“. The demo is a Visual Basic 6 program and shows how to:

• Dimension a new HEC-RAS object
• Load a specific project
• Execute the computations
• Plot Results
• Export the computed results

The VB6 program interacts with the HEC-RAS application server via a HECRASController object which have many properties and method. Unfortunately I could not find the documentation for these option so a lot of trial and error there. Some HEC-RAS GUI screens may be called as well:

Download RasClient here (ZIP file ~62KB)