Abstract: The gliding cable structures have found its application in many practical structures, but it is difficult or impossible to compute its deformations and internal forces by using traditional analytical method because of its relatively gliding at a common intersectional joint that connects two different intersectional structural components. This paper presents a totally new, efficient and unified structural analytical method for solving the internal forces and deformation of an engineering structure with gliding cable elements. The method, named as the frozen-heated method is to employ the two virtual temperature loads that are respectively imposed on two different intersectional structural components. Several numerical examples are presented for verifying the validity and efficiency of the frozen-heated method.