BIM 360 Docs Development Account for European Region

As described in this blog, there has been a change in API to access data stored in BIM 360 Docs in European data center. If you have customers in Europe, you most likely want to test your apps in European environment. (Please note that BIM 360 Docs in European region may have limited features compared with the version that is hosted in U.S. data center as typically new features are released in the U.S. first.)

If you wish to have a test environment in European region, please request for a free BIM 360 Docs account as below.

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BIM 360 Issues API Changes

Attention BIM 360 Issues API developers –

Around AU (Autodesk University) time frame, there will be a semantic change introduced to the current BIM 360 Issues API. Field Issues and Document Issues will be consolidated as a single set of Issues; i.e., Field Issues will include Document Issues, and Document Issues will be deprecated.

This change is expected to take place alongside of product’s Issues data migration and UI changes. At AU, you will hear the product team announcing the change and describe the detail. This is a part of enhancement that BIM 360 team is making in the effort to expand Issues functionalities to other modules and to provide a consistent, unified Issues feature.

See You at AU/DevCon Vegas

Hard to believe, but AU/DevCon Las Vegas, the biggest annual event by Autodesk, is less than two weeks away now. Our marketing team is busy pushing for the number of registrations while various product teams are working hard trying to push the new features out by AU. Our team including myself is busy reviewing new APIs and writing samples with APIs which are still hot in the oven.

I myself is speaking at one DevCon class about BIM 360 API on Monday, co-presenting with Xiaodong Liang and Augusto Goncalves:

Design Automation for Revit

As of this writing (6/20/2018), Design Automation for Revit (DA4R) is in private beta. It’s not publicly available. But we receive inquiries quite frequently. So I’m putting together a list of available materials to learn about DA4R. I intend to update this page as more information become available.

To use DA4R, you will need to know both worlds: Revit addin as desktop application, and Forge and/or Web programming. If you are not familiar with both, you may start looking at them to be ready when DA4R is.

Forge Demo Sites

Continuing with the previous post, when we talk about what Forge is and what you can do with it, the best way is to see demos. Many of samples shown in the recordings in my previous post are available for you to try out yourself.

Viewer

Autodesk Viewer
https://viewer.autodesk.com/
Free viewer site. You can give it a try with your favorite model.

What is Forge? Recordings and Tutorials

Trying to help my colleagues who are presenting about BIM 360 and Forge, I was giving a few pointers as reference. I thought the list might get handy for myself, too. So here it is a list of links to recordings about Forge in the context of AEC and BIM, together with the links to tutorial materials.

First, for those who are less technical and/or if you are interested in finding out what Forge is and what you can do with it, below show you with a plenty of demos of applications by our partners and ourselves:

• Forge for AEC in 5 min, by Jim Quanci
• BIM 360 & Business Opportunity with App Store, by Jim Quanci

If you are developer and interested in writing code, these will be a good starting point:

Troubleshooting Tips for Accessing BIM 360 Docs and Account Admin

Occasionally, we get contacted by a developer who is experiencing a difficulty making API calls to work with BIM 360 Docs and/or Account Admin. If you are having difficulty, here are a few suggestions you may want to double check:

1. When you create an app on the developer portal (http://developer.autodesk.com), make sure you select BIM 360 API for Account Admin and Document Management for Docs access. The link to the step-by-step instruction about creating an app is found here: https://developer.autodesk.com/en/docs/oauth/v2/tutorials/create-app/
2. In #1 above, if you do not see all the options for API, you may not have started the trial. Please refer to this blog post if you don’t see all the options: https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/not-all-apis-are-available-my-forge-app

Lab5 Forge API Intro – Get Properties & Search

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab4 “Forge API Web Intro JS”)

This post was prompted by an inquiry about accessing properties of Revit model using Forge API. He left a comment saying that he followed my tutorial and was able to view the uploaded model successfully. So let’s take Forge API Intro Lab4 as a starting point and build on top of it. In this post, we are going to add two functionalities that allow you to:

• Select an object and obtain its properties
• Search the model for a given string and isolate them in the viewer

Lab4 Forge API Web Intro JS

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab3 “Forge API Web Intro”)

Now that we have a model uploaded to our bucket and translated for viewing, the final piece of functionality that we want to add is an ability to view the uploaded model in a html page. To do this, Forge API provides a client side JavaScript API.

In this lab, we make a basic viewer, which is based on Basic Viewer Step-by-Step Tutorial and is slightly modified to put it in the context of our lab and make it easier to built on top of what we have built in the previous lab.

Lab3 Forge API Web Intro

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab2 “Forge API Intro”)

In the previous lab, we wrote a desktop client application that creates your own custom storage in the cloud, uploads a file to that storage, and translates it for viewing. Those core functions that we wrote to make REST calls can be easily included in your authoring tools, such as Revit and AutoCAD. Next, we write a simple ASP.NET web application. For now, we keep the basic functionality same as Lab2 (i.e., authenticate, create a bucket, upload a file, and translate). Later in the Lab4, we will add JavaScript layer to embed a viewer.

The good news is that we have written the functions to make the Forge web services REST calls in a way that we can simply reuse them. In the sample project, we put the common Forge REST calls under Forge folder. You can simply copy the folder to your web application if you have followed the labs 1 and 2.