An API coming?

[GuyR]

From the upfront.ezine blog:

http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2004/week3/index.html


Martyn Day went to the Revit 6 launch in England. He asked about the APIs (application programming interface).

While Autodesk had announced an API for Revit, he now noticed an amount of back tracking. Seems to be, he reports, not in the sense of general an API, but an API accessible when required for specific external processing, energy, acoustics, analysis, etc.

Guy

[PeterJ]

When we had a recent UK User Group meeting attended by Leonid Raiz and Carl Bass there was some discussion of this topic. Certain specific applications are being looked at, one of these being energy calculation. Practices vary so widely from country to country that the develp[ers felt it would be difficult to proffer a global solution and are therefore looking at market-by-market solutions with local partner companies, the first being based in California (from memory).

I don't think it was made clear whether an API was being opened to these specific partners or whether hooks were being placed into the model to allow them to query it as a dumb database. Other comments on ODBC output suggest it does not contain sufficient location information to allow meaningful queries so I can't guess what the parent rvt file might contain.

[gregcashen]

The parent revit file contains all of the location data. According to David Conant at AU there is actually an internal coordinate system that is simply not exposed in the ODBC output. As for the API, it is, I understand, being opened to the ADN guys first to do stuff like the energy analysis and some other stuff that will add to the functionality of Revit without duplicating in-house efforts.