Description
Key Learnings
- Discover Autodesk Platform Services APIs that have been added recently for Autodesk Construction Cloud products.
- Find out what new APIs are scheduled to come out around the AU time frame.
- Discuss plans for future development beyond the AU time frame.
Speaker
- Mikako HaradaMikako Harada works as a Senior Manager for the Developer Technical Services team at Autodesk. She provides API support for AEC products. Prior to joining Autodesk, she worked as a researcher for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. While at ETH, she worked with projects involving the development of web-based collaborative environment with the Swiss building industry and web-based visualization projects for business data archive systems, aiming to enlarge our knowledge by a means of visualizing a large amount of information. She was also a researcher at Engineering Design Research Center in Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Scott Fahlman’s lab (who is known as the father of Common LISP and the person who first sent the smiley face on the Internet), and Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Systems group at General Motors Technical Center. Her interests is in the areas of interactive techniques, optimization and layout synthesis.
MIKAKO HARADA: Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining. the Welcome to Autodesk University 2024. Today, I'm going to talk about Autodesk Construction Cloud API updates and then a little bit of a roadmap. My name is Mikako Harada. I'm a Senior Manager at the Autodesk leading a team, the Developer Technical Services team.
Safe harbor statement-- today, I'm going to talk about a little bit of forward-looking materials, together with more recent updates. So for this, this is the note that promise. And if you see something that containing forward-looking materials, please don't make purchase decisions based on that.
Agenda, so today I'm going to cover four topics. First one is Autodesk Construction Cloud overview. I will, first, quickly go through the current state of product side, followed by API status and then updates. I'll be going to talk about something which came this year together with something which we expect to have near future.
And then we will talk about the each changes or the expected change module-by-module base. And then, lastly, I will touch base AEC Data Model, which was released recently this year, and I will talk about what's coming next. And disclaimer, so this recording was done on September 20, and this will probably change for real the AU in-person presentations.
So, first, I'm going to talk about Autodesk Construction Cloud overview. So you might have seen this slide already a few times, well, because I've been using it for the last couple of years. And Autodesk, the Construction Management at Autodesk, this is a view for high-level product offering and evolutions. Autodesk grows with acquisitions, and Construction Management area is not exceptions.
In year 2011, Autodesk acquired Horizontal Glue. And, since then, there are various products was acquired. And currently, we have so-called the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform offerings based on five unified products. We also have additional products Assemble, BuildingConnected, Pype, and ProEst.
And then, more recently, Autodesk also acquired UNIFI, which is now called Content Catalog. You can access that from Revit and then Autodesk Construction Cloud now. And there is also a Datum360 and Payapps, or it is also known as GCPay in North America regions. So, together with those, Autodesk Construction Cloud, the product portfolio is growing.
And, in this context, sometimes ACC, or Autodesk Construction Cloud, is used in two different ways. One is specific [? fiber ?] product and also bigger branding, the ACC Construction Cloud. And today I'm going to talk about bigger definitions, including both unified product and then bigger collection of Autodesk Construction Cloud software or service profiles.
So this is if you go to construction.autodesk.com, at the product listing. This is the product that you see. The one shown in square blue is so-called unified product and then together with some additional products listed here.
And sometimes we talk about, ACC, especially when we talk about APIs or the application programming language, you will see ACC listed in aps.autodesk.com. When you see it, it's usually a unified product. So depending on the context we are talking about, you may need to take it as either unified product or the bigger branding Autodesk Construction Cloud naming.
When you go to Products to access all construction softwares, you will go into ACC.autodesk.com in case of the United States, and in Europe you are going to ACC.autodesk.eu. And now the third one, acc.aus-- this means that Australia-- .autodesk.com was recently released. I think it was March released. So you'll use a different URL depending on the regions, but there will be-- right now, we have a three regions covering.
And then the regional support-- as I mentioned, there are three regions-- Autodesk saves the data through those softwares. And the detailed listing, you can find it help.autodesk.com under the Autodesk Docs page. As you can see, the unified products are all supported in three regions. However, other products such as BuildingConnected and Pype, those are the ones available only US. This is due to, context-wise, it's very specific to US, the data providing and very specific to US. And, also, the BIM 360 is offered only for US and the European regions, not in Australia.
And for the product-side roadmap, I'm going to focus on the API. So if you are interested in product side, there is a roadmap page under construction.autodesk.com/products/product-roadmap. Please refer to those pages. The API roadmap is also included, but not all, so you may want to reference this for API as well, but this page is mainly focusing on the product-side update.
Next, I'm going to talk about the ACC and BIM 360 API status and then updates. So, first, when you go to aps.autodesk.com, Autodesk Platform Services dev portal page and then you choose API Products, as you can see here at the top right corner, AEC Data Model API, which is available with the Autodesk Docs, is listed. This is a new member of the API product.
And this is a listing of ACC and BIM 360 API component services available right now. If you see the product module name listed here, that means that there is an API. If you don't see the name listed, if you don't see the name listed here, that means that API is yet to come, and it's not exposed yet. So, for instance, like reporting features, it's not exposed. Its API is not exposed yet.
An ACC API roadmap, the first, on the left side, I'm going to go through the APIs which was added earlier this year. First one is Submittals Read API was added. And, also, this is just a one small endpoint, which is a Docs file description read. This seems to be very basic. However, we waited several years, and this is a very highly demanded feature as well. We are still waiting, right, but at least halfway. The Read is available now.
And then automatic region routing for ACC-specific API. This is the result of try to release for the Australia regions. The ACC API has optional region information, such as US and then EU. And instead of adding additional regions, the ACC team has decided to use automatic region, which has been already the most of the cases. However, there was an exception such as Admin API, but now it's all support, the automatic routing.
And then the next one is the Sheets Export PDF and Cost Budget-Contract links and then Parameters Collection API. Also, BuildingConnected team has released a big chunk Write API early this year. And TradeTapp, also. They have released the initial first the set of APIs which supports read.
And more recently, the Autodesk added the AEC Data Model API, which it was available as a beta, but it went general availability, officially released. It was in June.
And then submittals write recently added. And then cost, external relationship, this is the field you will see in various endpoints. This makes it easier to keep track of relationships with third-party applications. And then, also, similar to the files export functionality-- I think I was double-listing here, but the same as before, the Sheets PDF export. And then BuildingConnected, create the invite and webhook was also added.
In the near future, even though this is still a little bit of a question mark, but the product team is planning to release the Issues pushpin together with Markup APIs. And then Admin team also planning to release the user's projects, mean that giving you how many, a list of projects, giving you the belongs-to and then, also, the roles.
And Data Connector released multiple project support, and we are still awaiting documentation to update. And then, also, there is a high demand of accessing activities beyond one year. Currently, we can access only up to one year, so this is something we are also considering.
And then the cost, batch create cost items, taxes, sub-items in roadmap. And parameters, API team is also considering adding a custom list of the parameter items. And then TradeTapp flag the proposal. The CRUD is also on the roadmap.
And then, finally, AEC Data Model custom property read/write. And then geometry extraction, this would be limited to read. We expect it to be in a private beta.
And then, beyond that, the Secure Service Account. This one will not come this year, but we are hoping that this will be available next year. And webhooks for Admin and Issues, discussing to release this and then review. Right now, it's private beta. We are hoping to push it to public.
Then attribute project level support and then file description write, model aggregation, alignment, design collaboration, package settings, and then cost get distribution items, those are the ones that it's under consideration. It may, hopefully, the next year.
And going back to the topic of Australia region support, so it's ACC only. No BIM 360. And it also includes basic API such as data management, model derivative, webhooks, viewer as well.
And then all ACC-specific endpoints support automatic region routing, which I just explained in a previous slide. And, for instance, this means endpoint for US works for all regions. So if you were already familiar with some of the ACC API, especially Admin API, previously, we had a separate endpoint for US and Europe. Right now, it's US endpoint support both the European region as well as US and then Australia as well.
We also have optional region headers for some of the endpoints, even though it's not all. This will remain functioning, mainly because of the backward compatibilities and then also gaining a slight [INAUDIBLE] and the speed.
Then region value will change. So this is something we want to get your attention. If you run the API right now, you will see the region value is currently APAC. So, for instance, if you call GitHub, then you will see the APAC region. However, this one is going to change. It will change to A-U-S, AUS, Australia.
And the reason why is that compared with US or EU European regions, the APAC region is much larger, and then business side, business unit is quite different, quite diverse. So in order to align and for the business unit, we are going to separate Australia region from other APAC regions.
And region request is both. We now have both APAC and A-U-S AUS works. So if you are calling, if you are setting APAC in the endpoint, you should be able to switch to AUS. And then in the response, the region in response, either APAC or AUS during the transition period will appear. So we suggest that you check against both values in your code while transitioning.
We are still discussing exact date of switching over from APAC to AUS, and we hope to have clear messaging through the blog, through the newsletter. So, at this point, I would like to give you a heads up. Some changes are coming.
Next, I'm going to look at the changes by modules. So, once again, this is the component services and the structure of the APIs. And, among those, these highlighted ones are the ones which will see the changes this year, more recent year, so I'm going to focus on those six topics and followed by the BuildingConnected and TradeTapp.
OK, so first the Admin. So Admin has a page to activate access. It's also known as provisioning. So earlier this year, the Autodesk Admin team added one tools called Custom Integrations in the ACC UI. Previously, it was available only for BIM 360, and you needed to switch to BIM 360 Admin in order to activate or provision API access. But now you can have the ACC [? pay ?] ACC UI to provisions. So this is the one we used to use in BIM 360 UI. It should work in both ways.
Now, depending on your account, you may have both ACC and BIM 360, or you may have only ACC. If you have both, then you can use either way to provisions. The one difference is that activating, if you activate an ACC or both BIM 360, it activate all account levels. There is no granular control by, let's say, project levels. And this is the one highly demanded feature. And we've been talking about this quite some time, but it's not ready yet.
However, there is some work going on at the Autodesk in the backend side, which is called Secure Service Account. And we are starting some private betas without having a UIs, but with some the API-based secure account. So you'll probably hear about this private beta, probably soon, so a little heads up.
In parallel with this backend work, the Admin team, of course, planning to add these features in the UI. But at this point, the plan will be most likely next year. If we are lucky, might start seeing end of this year. But realistically, I would say next year.
And also, just to be aware that the difference between BIM 360 UI's provisioning versus ACC version of provisioning, if you use BIM 360 UI, it has some options, for instance, in account level, to select the access between Account Admin and then Docs. And then, also, there is a choice. You can invite the third-party developer versus use as an in-house developers.
So those options are gone. So if you are using ACC provisioning page, integration page, everything will be automatically accepted. So you have no control over there.
Now, next, the behavior change, so there was a little issues when you were calling creating project using template. You needed to add a project admin immediately after creating a project in order to activate a project. However, recently, there was some behavior change, so we no longer need a workaround. We are trying to update tutorials because tutorials actually said requires adding account admin immediately. In the UI, account admin-- sorry, project admin is added automatically, but in API you needed to do explicitly.
So next one is, this one is basically our team's work. So we now have a tutorial called ACC Administrator written in Node.js. If you are interested in learning how to write a Node.js servers and especially in admin contexts, we have tutorials. You can go to aps.autodesk.com. Click on Getting Started, and you will find ACC Administrator and the tutorials.
We are half way creating .NET version. We hope to have it probably after AU. And there are a couple of roadmap items, all at least for near future. User projects, this is the list of projects the user has access. This is also an occasionally demanded feature, and then also project roles and project companies.
And then there is also webhooks. These webhooks would be the ones when you submit a job. For instance, creating a project or adding users may take some time, so it will be more convenient if you have webhooks instead of polling many times before the project is accessible. So this is also in the roadmap that the product team is considering.
And Data Connector, there's a multiple projects support. It's already in production. Instead of one single project, you can set a project list in array format. And we are currently waiting on documentation. If you are in desperate need, feel free to contact aps.help@autodesk.com. I will give you a little more detail about it.
Also, I want to get your attention, if you are a user of Data Connector, recently, we have added a limit to code requests. The number is 24 APIs per day. So basically you can call the Data Connector request, the extraction request, one hour, once in hour. The reason why is that the purpose of Data Connector is not about using the live update, and it's actually try to dump all the data. You can even dump from whole account, so it's a massive data.
So, because of that, the intention was-- we never intended to make it calling like 100 times per minute. But the reality is that we didn't have a smaller number or rate limit, so we have some customers who just create recurrent jobs one after another and sometimes seems to forget. So this is to protect your data, and then also the servers respond to your request properly instead of having like a oops mistakes by the users.
Parameters, so Parameter API was introduced last year. And then, recently, we have added additional features to create the collections. And we have some blog posts explaining detail. Please take a look.
And then we also created the new samples. So this is Revit doing samples to define shared parameters from the parameter services. In case you are interested in, we have this sample in GitHub and also a blog post. So you may want to go through from the blog post. You'll find the link to the GitHub.
So what's next? So the other roadmap, the Parameters team is planning to have a custom list, like the list selections, for instance, like apple and oranges kind of listing, and then project-specific support. So, right now, the parameters service is defined by account level, and they are planning to have it for more project-specific levels and then, also, custom project parameters at the project level available.
And then another thing is this is related to permissions or access level, so standard admin. Name might change, but the admin which is more responsible for defining standards for the companies. So this admin is expected to be added, and this is basically, for instance, the parameters as well as content catalog, which some of you may be aware that added relatively recently to the ACC Account Admin page as well. So, there, you can control library, template, and other standardizations.
Now, next, component within Build. So first one is submittal. Submittal team has been diligently working for first one is read APIs, which was officially released earlier this year, and we had a beta last year. And scope was submittal, the getting submittal items, item types, package, et cetera. And the write API was added during this summer-- actually, it's last month, sorry, last month-- and you can now create items in spec as well and together with some supporting read endpoint was released.
Then, next, the Submittal team is planning to release the API to create the attachment to items. This attachment is not a link to the docs but attachment specific to given items.
And Sheets, Sheets has added the export to PDF functionalities. We had this functionality in the files, but they're not in Sheets, so this one was added. And the similar to files export, there is an option to export with or without markup and hyperlinks. You can also find a blog post with more details.
And, by the way, I'm going to post a handout together with those blog post and links. So when the AU is open, please refer to that one.
Next, cost management. So, of course, the management team, the Cost team is diligently adding, updating APIs little by little, due to the fact that the documentation is taking a little longer than we hoped. So it's a little-- it looks slow, but the API is almost ready. And the Cost team is working hard for releasing little by little, especially try to go through the documentation pipeline more smoothly.
So the ones in the enhancement, released as an enhancement, is external relationship. So this is the one that you can find. Several the endpoints now have the Extended Relationship field. So this one is the one you can use to [? leave ?] your own or third-party applications to link with the Cost API, cost management.
And, also, a Budget-Contract linked API was added relatively recently, and this actually make it easier to add those relation link, budget-contract links. However, we had the one-one relationship in the contract batch, post and patch contract. And in the post and budget-contract, budget field is now deprecated. And it's actually very soon, less than a month, it's going to be deprecated, so if you are using post or batch contract and then using Budget field, please replace it with the budget.
Please rewrite, using budget and contract links. You can do it separately, now. And then make sure you do not lose the functionality because of missing, that one. If you didn't know and then you still need time, there may be a slight chance that we can extend, but please hurry up and then change it, please.
And Cost Management has some roadmap-- batch create cost items, get taxes, and cost sub-items. Those are hopefully coming soon. The API is ready. It's documentation we are still waiting. And then, after that, get distribution item is in the roadmap.
As always, Cost Management team is always welcome feedback, and they are more responding. Their way of planning is the prioritizing a request. So I will encourage you to give us a feedback if you need more functionalities.
OK, so that was the ACC. Now, next one is a BuildingConnected and then TradeTapps, more on the financial side.
So BuildingConnected Write API was released, had a major release in March, this year. And you can create, update, delete projects, the project costs. This project is the BuildingConnected-specific project, and project costs and members and so on. You can find more information in a blog post. It's listed here.
And more recently, during the summer, the team released the webhooks, and supported events is also listed here, such as the bid.created and the opportunity.comment, created, deleted, updated, and then also opportunity.created, status.updated. Those are the ones you can catch the events. And then, also, create the invites with the emails. They have released as well.
Once again, we have a blog post about those updates. Please refer to it for the detail.
And learning materials, BuildingConnected team did a good job of documenting all the materials. So please look at the APS site. And there is sample in GitHub as well, together with the Postman collection. Now, for instance, this is the GitHub sample [? Sheldon ?] in our team has created. This one integrates the BuildingConnected bid leveling and then take-off and then compares the amount of the takeoff values between two systems.
And, next, TradeTapp. So TradeTapp team released the first set of APIs during the spring, this year. And scope is to read the read-only vendors' qualification and other financial information to read. And, again, we have a blog post and documentation and then also samples. In near future, the TradeTapp team is currently working for releasing the flag proposals, for the create/read, the CRUD, the collections. And there is also a samples written by [? Dennis, ?] and you can find information through the blog posts as well.
OK, so the last topic, yet the big topic, probably, is the AEC Data Model. So AEC data model remained the general availability in June. And though we had a relatively long period, private and then public betas, but now officially are out. So the AEC data model enables granular access to AEC data, the design data stored in the cloud.
So this will be [? evaluating, ?] compared with the Revit file-based data. Currently, the Revit model has to be in the files. But once you have data in the cloud, you can access from anywhere, any time.
And Autodesk Docs, US and EMEA region is supporting this functionality. Australia region is still to come. And the supported products, file type is a model type is Revit 2024 and 2025. And you can find the blog post on especially AEC Data Model API. Technical resources has a collection of good listing to the GitHub and then the Postman samples, et cetera.
And well, now, this picture, you see the Account Admin UI. And under the Settings, you will see Advanced Sections, AEC data model. In order to use AEC data models, you will need to activate this feature. Once you activate it, it's activated to whole account. You can not actually turn off. So once you activate, it's always on, but it shouldn't affect other features as well. So you don't need to worry about keeping activate affecting other performance or things like that. It's completely separate stream.
And then, also, there is a AU class, SD3680, presented by Joao and then PM Mike Engel. This would be on Tuesday, October 15th. This one will dive into the technical detail of AEC data models. So if you are interested in either, go to this class or try to watch the recording of this page.
And just quickly, so I don't have time to go into too much details, but AEC Data Model, in nutshell, it's a GraphQL. Other ACC API is usually REST API, except viewers, but the AEC Data Model is using GraphQL. In some way, it's similar to REST API. Same idea, using HTTP. However, it has more flexibility. It's almost like coding using REST API. So you can do some multiple operations.
Also, the strength is you can call various queries. For instance, you can query across the project or the single project or versions. And then the most powerful part is that you can query project per element properties as well.
In here, in the picture, you see Explorer tools. This is available here, everybody. Once you activate it and you are programmers, I recommend you to go through this Explorer tool so you can explore what kind of data your model has. And then you can directly connect core. You have the GraphQL code from your application as well. This will be a good tool for learning as well as troubleshooting as well.
What's next? So the near future, it could be, by AU time, we are expecting to have two additional queries, distinctProperty values in ElementGroup ID or by name. So what does this mean? So distinct property means that it returns a list of distinct or different values in a given field. So, for instance, you can imagine that if there is a value A, A, A, B, B, B, C, C, C, you may want to have at least A, B, C, which means that all the different values without duplicating that kind of functionality is added.
And the next one, next one is a big one and, you know, still in the oven, but we are hoping to see it started to have a private beta, which is a custom properties. This custom property is aiming at the Read and Write. That means that you can save your own properties, let's say, own properties to your Revit windows, for instance, in the cloud, not to the Revit files itself. And you can access from all sorts of applications and then geometry extractions. So those are the ones we are hoping to hear news from product team as the private betas.
And then other just a sneak kind of preview type, the images, so we are experimenting with these functionalities, especially the custom properties, Read/Write. So we can define the custom property based on the parameter services, either UI or the APIs. You define the parameters, definitions in the ACC, in the ACC collection, and you use that to define the custom property in the AEC Data Model database.
And you can use Revit add-in to the interact with cloud custom properties, or you can also access this one from the assets or a cost or the takeoff, any other applications as well as your own third-party application as well. This will be a powerful addition for the AEC data models. I'm, myself, very much looking forward to see these features.
OK, so the summary. Today, talked about Autodesk Construction Cloud and gave you a very, very brief overview of the product side update, followed by the API status update. I also talked about a little bit more detail about the update and what's coming by module-by-module basis. And then, in the last topic, I talked about the AEC data model, and then we mentioned about what might be coming very soon.
Thank you very much.