BIM 360 Docs Account for Development

As we finish the BIM 360 focused webinars, we are receiving requests for BIM 360 Docs account for development. I talked about it in the second webinar. Here is the instruction to make it easy to find by googling.

• ADN members – if you are an ADN member, you can request a developer version of license from the ADN extranet: adn.autodesk.io >> Development Software and Web Services Request Form.
• Paid account owners – If you already have a paid BIM 360 Docs account, you can use your own account. (If you do not see “Apps and Integration” tab under SETTINGS tab of Account Admin module, you don’t have an access to API. You will need to request to activate it. Please refer to this post for where to make a request.)
• If neither of above applies to you, you have two choices:
  • Join ADN (www.autodesk.com/joinadn Standard or Professional)
  • Request for a free BIM 360 Docs account for development purpose:
    1. Register for BIM 360 Hackathon https://bim360hackathon.devpost.com/
    2. Create a trial account for BIM 360 Docs at https://bim360.autodesk.com/try-for-free
    3. Then follow the process written here to convert your trial to the developer account

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Materials from BIM 360 Online Hackathon Webinars

We just finished BIM 360 focused webinar series. The webinars were a part of BIM 360 Hackathon, the online event lasting for three months from August 1^st to October 31^st. The event is to kick off the opening of the new App Store for BIM 360. (Yes, we have App Store for BIM 360 now!) Currently, the store shelf only has apps that are “home grown”. The idea of the webinars is to help developers jump start implementing web service applications using BIM 360 and Forge.

If you missed the webinars, no worries. The webinars were recorded and are posted to the YouTube. I’m adding the links to the recording along with the presentation slides below.

No “Apps & Integrations” tab?

To access data stored in BIM 360 Docs through API, you need to manually “provision” your app first. This is done in “Account Admin” page >> “Settings” tab >> “Apps & Integrations” >> “Add Integration”:

Folder Creation API for BIM 360 Docs

API to create a folder in BIM 360 Docs is finally available. Before you go back to your code and try it out yourself, however, I should point out a few things that you may want to be aware:

• It uses commands (not POST-project-folders end point)
• It supports in the user context only: i.e., 3-legged authentication and 2-legged with x-user-id specified. No full 2-legged is supported at this time.

Note that BIM 360 Team and other A360 based data management service uses POST-projects-folders endpoint to create a folder; the command version does not work for them. These may potentially add confusion if you are not aware up front. BIM 360 Docs team is aware of these gaps and will continue to work on to provide consistent, full 2-legged support at later time. For now, most importantly, we have a way to create folder!  Let’s take a look.

From DevDay Online 2016 Webinars

Last month, we held a series of webinars titled “DevDays Online 2016”. They are online version of Developer Days presentations that we gave in several cities across the world last November and December. They are intended for people who couldn’t attend the conferences in person.

I was responsible for BIM 360 API updates. If you watched a recording of the last year’s my DevCon session, the baseline of the contents are similar. But it was slightly updated with the news about the preview of Data Management API access for Docs being released.  If you are new to Forge API and interested in using the API with BIM 360 Docs and family products, this will give you a good overview of what Forge API is about in the context of BIM 360.

Field API: Updating a Equipment Creates a Duplicated Record

Q. I’m trying to update an existing equipment record. By calling /api/equipment, however, I end up creating a new record with the same values.  I used /api/get_equipment to get an equipment record, and using /api/equipment to update. What do I need to do to update an existing record?

A. Please check your JSON string representing a record and make sure that you are using “id” and not “equipment_id”. For example, if your equipment ID in JSON data looks like this:

[{“equipment_id“:”a9df893e-d9b9-4098-b434-e7d2be62d0a8”, …

then, you will need to modify it to:

[{“id“:”a9df893e-d9b9-4098-b434-e7d2be62d0a8”, …

Forge Subscription FAQ

I’m not an expert of sales side of discussion. Still, questions like “does ADN membership include Forge subscription?” comes to me occasionally. Forge subscription model itself has evolved since the DevCon last year. There are a few things that I myself wasn’t sure and needed to ask. So here I’m sharing a few questions and answers that I happen to have received recently. These are supplemental to the information that are described on the official Forge pricing page: https://developer.autodesk.com/en/pricing

Disclaimer: the information written here is from the best of my knowledge at the time of this writing (2/4/2017). There may be some changes coming in future. Please check the latest on the official pricing page, and use “Contact Forge Sales” button found at the bottom of that page for more information.    

HQ API: Get Companies Under a Specific Project

The latest update for HQ includes an API enhancement; you can get a list of companies that are related to a specific project. The documentation is found here:

GET projects/:project_id/companies

In UI, you can find corresponding information under Project icon >> {a_given_project} >> Companies tab (see the image below).

I just gave it a try. Nothing complex. But thought keeping some snapshots (while I have it at hand) might help understand what this functionality is about more easily.

BIM 360 Docs API Update

I’m happy to inform you that the latest update for Forge Data Management (DM) includes important enhancements for BIM 360 Docs support; you can upload a file now (y). The documentation page is updated to include Docs. I myself have been waiting for this for a long time. While we are aware that this is not complete, this is a big milestone. Here is a quick summary of the current status of DM support for Docs.

Key Points

Basic workflow is identical to A360 Personal Hubs and BIM 360 Team (as well as Fusion Team). A few differences are:

• Docs support 2-legged and 3-legged.
• “Hubs” is equivalent of “Accounts” in BIM 360.
• Docs requires an additional step for provisioning or activating API access in HQ.
• Look for the use of extension types, such as *:autodesk.bim360:* instead of *:autodesk.core:*

API Basics page describes extension types and data management services in detail.

3-Legged Authentication Using Postman

Continuing from the previous post about 2-legged authentication, let’s take a look at 3-legged authentication or more precisely OAuth 2.0 3-legged authentication with Forge next. My colleague, Adam Nagy, has already written a blog post about calling 3-legged using Postman. My rewrite will be with additional comments with BIM 360 in mind.

BIM 360 Team and Docs support 3-legged. HQ does not.

Prerequisite:

• You will need to create an app in the developer portal.
• To use BIM 360 Docs, you will need to integrate/register your client ID in HQ.
• Have Postman installed.