SSO (Single Sign On) Not Supported by Glue API

Q. We are having a problem using BIM 360 Glue API. Our company has deployed SSO (Single Sign On) with Autodesk login. We cannot login to Glue through API. We get an error when trying to call a login endpoint: “ERROR;400;A system error was encountered. If the situation continues, please contact Autodesk technical support.”

A. BIM 360 Glue API unfortunately does not support SSO. Glue is built with older technology, and its API was not designed and implemented to use SSO. SSO is currently not officially supported by the Glue product team.

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2-Legged or 3-Legged?

If you are starting with Forge and BIM 360 APIs, one of the first learning point may be about authentication. In this post, I’m going to discuss another frequently asked question: what endpoints work with what authentication method?

Autodesk Build and Other Autodesk Construction Cloud Unified Products Launch

On February 9th, Autodesk announced the availability of Autodesk Build. Autodesk Build is a successor of BIM 360 Build. New Autodesk Build brings together the best of BIM 360 and PlanGrid into a single application for project and field management. Along with Autodesk Build, Autodesk Docs, Autodesk BIM Collaborate and Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro are also launched. Autodesk Take Off, which is the official name for the product announced as Quantify at AU last year, was launched in March.

If you are already a BIM 360 user, you may have noticed that its user interface (UI) has changed; It is also a part of the efforts to bring our existing construction tools to the next stage as unifying products.

Autodesk Construction Cloud Unified Products: Does it Affect My Application?

During AU 2020 last month, Autodesk announced four new products for AEC:
Autodesk Build, Autodesk BIM Collaborate, Autodesk Quantify and Autodesk Docs.

As a Forge Developer, you may be wondering what this means to your application. “Does my existing integration with BIM 360 continue to function?” “What do we need to integrate with new products offerings?” The detail of product features and their APIs are still to come. In a nutshell, new products offerings are unification of existing products’ features. Many parts remain unchanged while if you are not familiar with a certain product, features coming from it may look new to you.

In this post, we will take the first look at what is expected to happen with upcoming new products offerings from Forge/BIM 360 API perspective.

Rate Limiting

Update March 14, 2021: If you would like to increase the rate limit for your application, please fill this form, “Rate Limit change request form“, and send the request to: forge.help@autodesk.com

Update June 19, 2020: Rate Limits information is added to the developer portal now.  For example, here is the link to the Data Management Rate Limits page. Rate limits in other Forge API should be added eventually.

Rate limiting is used to control amount of traffic sent or received by a network. For example, if you are using a certain API which is configured to allow 1000 requests per minute, your call will fail after hitting the limit, typically resulting 429 return code. This is a commonly used practice for a better flow of data and to increase security by mitigating attacks such as DoS.

Forge has rate limiting as well. When you are writing a code for scalable solution, you will need to take it into consideration; i.e., When you hit a limit, you will need to wait till  given period has lapsed and retry.  429 response will contain “Retry-After” http header, which indicates the number of seconds after which the client can call again.  Below is an example of response when hitting a limit: 

BIM 360/ACC API Known Issues and Wishes

Last updated: 1/25/2023

I receive inquiries about BIM 360 and API all the time. There are certain topics which pops up quite regularly. I have been thinking to have a page about them so that people can see what is known and what is potentially needed to report or raise as a wish. So here is it, below is the list of issues and wishes we are aware of. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. I plan to add more here as we encounter new items. Of course, I will mark as resolved when a certain item is resolved.

fieldapi/checklists/v1/:id Change in “source” Field in Response

If you have been using Field API’s endpoint: GET /fieldapi/checklists/v1/:id, you may be aware that it did not return “source” information; “source” field in response has been simply “{}”. This was because “source” was added after the API was written, there was an enhancement wish logged against it (CS-34452). The good news is that this has been implemented recently (June 3, 2019 to be exact). Now you can get this field value (y).

BIM 360 Project Home: Card Library and Partner Apps

1/4/2023 Update: you can use the same process to request to add your company’s app to the card library in Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) unified products.   

BIM 360 Project Home has a feature that allows you to customize its dashboard. The user can choose a “card” from a card library and add a pane within the main web page of Project Home, which represents the entrance to your app much like iframe does in HTML.

DA for Revit – Learning Materials

As I’m preparing for a class at BiLT ANZ 2019 conference in Melbourne, I was putting together a list of learning materials for Design Automation, specifically with Revit users in mind. Design Automation for Revit (or “DA for Revit” in short here) is currently in public beta. Anybody can give it a try.

That said, for any serious development, you do need Revit installed on your desktop as after all, you will be running Revit add-ins in the cloud. If you want to learn how Design Automation works and get a feel of it by running code samples, it is possible to try out without having a desktop version of Revit.

To start with, let me list learning materials below:

BIM 360/Autodesk Docs Development Account for European Region

Update March 17, 2022: ADN member can request an account in European region in the same Software Request Form in the ADN member site.   

Update July 8, 2021: Added Autodesk Docs. BIM 360 Docs is included in Autodesk Docs.

As described in this blog, there has been a change in API to access data stored in BIM 360/Autodesk Docs (Docs for short) in European data center. If you have customers in Europe, you most likely want to test your apps in European environment. (Please note that 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.)