Automatically Generate DWG from SaaS

[vnase792192]

We have developed a SAAS engineering database application.
The electrical data in the database are complete enough to generate Electrical ACAD Schematics "manually."

My question is how we could autogenerate DWG Schematics directly ("automatically) from our web application (with or without "Templates").
I need some advice about what product could do the job?
Do I have to work with "ObjectARX" or could I use FORGE?

As you noticed I'm not a subject matter expert but I want to understand our options.

Thanks!

[norman.yuan]

As my understanding of what you described, your SAAS application is just a backend services that provide engineering data for generating drawing (*.dwg) files. When you say "generate... manually", I assume it means CAD user uses AutoCAD (desktop) to access the data from the backend data services and generates drawing with custom AutoCAD add-in code running to minimize the user interaction in the process.

So, it would depend on what type of front user app you want to use to start the drawing generation process.

1. If all users start the process with AutoCAD, you can develop AutoCAD add-in (preferably with AutoCAD .NET API), to the generating process with minimum user interaction, say, user only needs to start AutoCAD and click a button (or enter a command), one drawing, or a set of drawings could be generated by AutoCAD using the data provided by the SaaS backend app.

2. if you want to user who does not have access to AutoCAD to do this, you would
a. use Autodesk's Forge services (it is a SaaS platform by itself) to develop your services. Forge provides a "remote AutoCAD" as services to allow you to do what AutoCAD does at your desktop. For development, you'd need to do AutoCAD .NET API add-in development for testing/debugging. Once your process code has been tested in local AutoCAD, you move/publish the code to Forge as workitem/action, so the process could be accessed as services. Then you can build either desktop or web front app to let user start drawing generation process.
b. You can license RealDwg SDK from Autodesk, so that you can generate drawing without AutoCAD (local or remote/Forge services). And this RealDwg app could be either services, or local desktop.

I'd go either with Forge services, or with AutoCAD desktop (if all the users who needs to generate drawings have AutoCAD installed).

[vnase792192]

Hello Norman,

I appreciate the quick reply. As you might have already noticed, I'm neither a software developer nor a CAD specialist.

Let me explain more about our plans.
We use our cloud-based engineering database to store all sorts of information. The database is highly flexible. We are working on integrating a JS-Editor to allow generating output files for specific applications (not CAD yet).
We want to expand the idea to CAD by using the data directly or using JaveScript to prepare the data to be suitable for AutoCAD. Again, we thought about using template drawings, no templates, or with API's to "remote" generate the drawings.

Your responses seem to make a lot of sense. Now that I have some first suggestions, I can start my research with some useful base data.

Thanks!