Support of Speckle for IFC

BenHur · 5 August 2022 09:43

Hello,

I am new in Speckle community. Great work speckle is doing.

In my company we are evaluating cad/bim platforms and we have a strong requirement, we need to store all bim models in our persistence layer in ifc format.

Questions:

a) I know speckle ifc support is recent, since 2021. What is the maturity level of ifc? Do speckle support the majority of the attributes? I am not ifc expert but this standard/format seems to be huge.

b) Do speckle support big ifc files? By “big” I mean things like a building, a city.

c) Do speckle give the ability to query ifc attributes (eg from a speckle stream)? Do speckle give the ability to decompose (eg from ifc file to objects)? And compose (eg from speckle stream to ifc file)?

Thank you.
Alberto

teocomi · 6 August 2022 06:30

Hi @BenHur !

Welcome to these parts

Speckle is currently supporting IFC as an additional way to get data inside the platform, it is not possible to export IFC at this time.

When an IFC file is uploaded we break it down to each individual element and store it in our database, to do so we are using parts of IFC.js (so, yes to decomposing, but no to composing IFC). Part of what we support is dependent on that library.

Nevertheless all IFC properties become Speckle properties and you are able to access/query them.

In terms of performance we currently have set some upload limits but these can be configured.

I’d suggest you give it a try and let us know

PavelNedviga · 8 August 2022 13:21

Hello @teocomi!

Does Speckle has an API for downloading previously uploaded IFC (initial file)? It is important for us to have one sourse for store and exchange the data around the projects.

Thks

teocomi · 8 August 2022 13:37

Hi @PavelNedviga, it is possible to do so from the UI, so there is definitely an API endpoint behind

This should point you in the right direction, and apologies if it’s not documented yet!

github.com

specklesystems/speckle-server/blob/52a10ce1ef60460a449da0c9b82c0e7c207ce5a7/packages/frontend/src/main/components/stream/uploads/FileProcessingItem.vue#L122-L130


      
          async downloadOriginalFile() {
            const res = await fetch(
              `/api/stream/${this.$route.params.streamId}/blob/${this.fileId}`,
              {
                headers: {
                  Authorization: AppLocalStorage.get('AuthToken')
                }
              }
            )

BenHur · 9 August 2022 07:25

Hello @teocomi,
thank you for your response.

We will try Speckle in order to understand it a little better.

Regards,
Alberto

DiellzaE · 8 February 2023 09:34

Hi all,

Following up the topic, is there any update in exporting IFC from Speckle?

Thank a lot,
Diellza

jonathon · 8 February 2023 09:39

Welcome back to the forum Diellza.

No updates to tell, I’m afraid. Since you last visited, there have been many improvements to the parsing of IFC to get data into Speckle for use in other applications, thanks to @dimitrie, the late-night owl.

However, there is nothing new about exporting files from Speckle of any format.