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.

Sponsored Post Sponsored Post Menu More Info Learn from the experts: Create a successful blog with our brand new courseThe WordPress.com Blog

WordPress.com is excited to announce our newest offering: a course just for beginning bloggers where you’ll learn everything you need to know about blogging from the most trusted experts in the industry. We have helped millions of blogs get up and running, we know what works, and we want you to to know everything we know. This course provides all the fundamental skills and inspiration you need to get your blog started, an interactive community forum, and content updated annually.

Register now

BIM 360 Dev Account Expired

Q. The BIM 360 Account I had for my development is expired. What can I do to extend it?

A. If your dev account is expired, but you still need it for your development purpose, you can send a request to:

bim360appsactivations@autodesk.com

with the title “BIM 360 Docs – API Activation Request”. When you do so, please include the email address of BIM 360 Account Admin, and explain that your account was expired and you want to extended it. 

Rate Limiting

Update June 19, 2020: Rate Limits information is added to the developer portal now.  e.g., for Data Management Rate Limits. Rate limits in other Forge API should be added near future as well.

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 API Known Issues and Wishes

Last updated: 12/15/2020

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

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 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.

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: