A Tale of Two Data Sources: Integrate and Extend your Construction Ecosystem with BIM 360 API and FORGE

KEITH WHITE: All right, we're gonna go ahead and get started. Thank you for being here with us today, especially day two of the official AU conference. So some of you probably had a good time last night. You probably didn't win a lot of money at the table, otherwise you wouldn't be here. So thank you for not being a winner, all right.

My name is Keith White. I'm a technical consultant with Autodesk Consulting. Prior to joining Autodesk as a technical consultant, I was an architect for many years. So I've got about 20, 25 years in the construction and design industry. I worked the light on Revit API, Forge platform, Glue, Field, Naviswork, stuff like that. So I'm joined with Saikat.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: Hello everyone. My name is Saikat Bhattacharya. I'm part of the technical consulting team with Keith. My specialization is like, Keith again, with the focus on AEC products and APIs, primarily focusing on the integrations and customizations. I'm based out of San Rafael, been with Autodesk for 12 years, with the prior role of EPA evangelist. And again I've worked with different locations. Right now, I'm based out of California.

Very Very good. All right so you guys have had access to this prior to start. So we got a lot of material. So we're not going to cover the class summary or learning objectives. But we hope at the end of this that you'll have a lot more familiarity with what's possible with the Forge API, and especially BIM 360. So just a real quick show of hands, has anyone in here started dabbling with Forge at all? Awesome. Contractors, anyone in the contracting? Business owners or-- very good, very good, OK, facility owners.

All right, so some of the stuff that I'm specifically going to cover is kind of from a point of view of a person getting started with rest API, with web development kind of stuff from the very beginning. So if you're an experienced web developer or an experienced developer, pardon me for kind of covering some simple material. But I thought it would be helpful to get started just showing some of the things that are going to be helpful for a person getting started.

So looking at Forge, we've got three main things we're going to be talking about today. We've got the Forge platform itself. You've been hearing a lot about Forge. Saikat and I presented this past May in San Francisco at the first ever Forge DevCon. There's another Forge DevCon coming up next year, so, maybe something that you want to be interested in. BIM 360 itself, where it fits inside of the forward platform. And we're also going to look at the BIM 360 user experience.

All right. So looking at the Forge platform itself, you could see that the Forge platform is actually made up of a whole bunch of modules, a whole bunch of data layers where we can access data from many different parts of this Forge API. So we're looking at this top part right here. And we're going to be focusing on the integrate and extend module. And we're going to be looking at the BIM 360 API specifically.

So Forge is really large. Lot of moving parts inside of this, so connecting all of the various Autodesk cloud services with data, data at the center, data behind everything. So that's what we're connecting with.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: Just to add to what Keith said, you can think of Forge like LEGO blocks. It provides you with different parts. And you can create your own thing with these different parts. It provides you a framework. And it also provides you with APIs.

Now these Forge APIs are ourselves by Autodesk, being leveraged to create these solutions that you see on the top layer. So essentially what Autodesk is doing is creating a developer platform, which is both secure, scalable, and kind of meets the requirements of integration aspects.

So when you're writing code, custom code, or integrating any aspects of your ERP systems, or your enterprise applications, you're essentially leveraging the same platform that Autodesk itself is using and is heavily investing on. And as you can see, like Keith mentioned, BIM 360 is a solution that's built on top of those services, which is Forge.

So again, with BIM 360, the portfolio of products is really growing. Again, because it's based on the principles of Forge, it leverages the APIs that underlying. Like Keith said, we have access to the data just like any BIM 360 product does. So it really opens up your access to that data and make sure that whether you're creating a solution from ground up, or you are integrating into an existing application, you essentially have access to everything that you would need.

So again, the ecosystem is really thriving because of the open-ended nature of this entire scope of the architecture itself. We have different construction workflows that we have our solutions for. But again, I'm probably repeating myself here, because you have access to the underlying APIs, you can build your own solutions on top of it as well and do the integrations.

At a platform level, the intent is to have BIM 360 Docs as the platform data management layer. And will, again, that would be sitting on top of, that is sitting on top of the Forge layer itself. So again, we go into the details as we move on. But essentially this is just to tell you that it's a growing ecosystem. You have different construction workflows that you deal with on a day to day basis. The APIs allow you to go deep dive and access that data, which is sitting at the core. You have a single source of truth that you can envision for your own ecosystem.

KEITH WHITE: And a big, the focus of this class is kind of going to be on this stuff over here in the bottom, which is connecting Forge and the BIM 360 API to your construction ecosystem, to your ERP system. So that's what this class is going to be focusing on is that particular connection.

All right. So with the BIM 360 HQ platform, right, so we've talked about Forge. So Forge is sitting up here. And in, a lot of you are familiar already with these different BIM 360 services. So we've got Field, Glue, Plan, and Docs. There's others there as well. But these are the ones that, especially construction firms, are really familiar with already.

So we're talking today as in the BIM 360, our Account Administration HQ. This is what we're going to be talking about. This is our doorway between the Forge platform and these services. So this is where we're going to be discussing today how you can use the BIM 360 API to make those integrations from your CMIC system, or your SharePoint system, into these services here and help you control projects, clients, contractors, things of that nature.

So, kind of as a primer for what we're going to be talking a little bit more detail the BIM 360 HQ functionality, we have a couple of key roles and we have a couple of key API categories that we want you to be aware of. So with the user roles, you have account admins, these are people that have access to the full account. They see all the projects, all the people, everything inside of it.

And then you also have corporate developers. So these are when you have your own development team internal, and you want to develop your own apps and integrations, that's yourself. And then you can also invite external, third party developers that you're contracting with them, and you have to give them access to your account. So that's another one of the key user roles, are those external partners.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: So from the API categories, as you can see, we will cover the aspects of how to make secure connections, how do you authenticate your calls when every time you try to access the APIs. We'll show you how we can create projects within HQ using the API, which is again, BIM 360. And then we'll also show you how to activate services. For example, after you've created a project, you only need Field as a service for a specific project. How do you do that?

The other aspects are adding users to the member directory so that if somebody's at Field, they can actually have an access to all the users who are already part of the project at the HQ or the Account Administration level, and have an easy access to allow project admin, to add users, or remove them from that particular service itself.

We'll also cover the aspects of business units and that's about it.

KEITH WHITE: Activation of the services. All right, so I'm going to take you through the BIM 360 User Experience. Has anyone been in this at all yet on the web? Have you seen this? All right, so there's a couple. So that's really good. So for those of you who are not familiar with this, when you log in to, basically it's a web access, so when you log in, you're greeted with this, which is a dashboard. And so this is relative to your account that you've logged into.

So at the very beginning, you have this is your dashboard. It shows you some widgets with some analytical data, number of projects. This is one that's really key, right. It's when your account starts and renews. So this gives you a heads up when you log in. You're good until whatever time your contract runs out. So you won't have any surprises that your services ended and all of a sudden you have project related access issues. So it's very secure. It's private. And this is your gateway into BIM 360.

Now you're going to see on the slide there's some blurry stuff. And this is because these are real people that we're working with. So I've kind of hidden and blurred out their names just to protect their privacy. So with this, we actually are logged in. And this is a list of projects.

So in this particular example, there's 27 projects. Here's their names, gives you some information about how many members are in it, the number of companies, if it's an active project, and when was the last time you signed in. So this is our test account, but it does have real people. So that's why you see that there's few members and few last logins. So you get a list of what your active projects are.

All right you also have a member directory. Here's all the people associated with your projects in your account. So these are all the people that have been added to your projects. You also, over here, you can see how many active users, inactive users, and the relative roles, how many account admins you have, project admins, stuff like that. So this is you're, basically, it's just a heads up of what's going on with your project, or your account. You can add and remove people. It's very simple, very straightforward for you to take a look at.

Same thing with companies, you have partner companies that you invite in. So you add users through partner companies and you give them access to your account as well. So when you're working with subcontractors, or with other people working with you on your projects, this is where you add them in.

And then lastly we get to the account settings. And so you'll see that with the account settings, if you have a project logo, or account logo, you'd have an account logo here, and then you have a list of who the account administrators are. Really simple to see this stuff.

Business units, so, I had a couple of conversations with the different clients about business units and how all of this work. So if you're a very large company and you have multiple business units and different time zones, different regions of the country or the world, that's where this comes into play. So you can track, and this helps with your own analytics, so that you know what products are where and how successful they are based on these business units that are being set up. So this is a categorization method for you to set up your projects in your work.

And then lastly, this, we're going to spend a lot of time here, today. We're going to be creating, really we're going to be creating a number of these things today. But we're also going to talk about apps and integrations. And so you have an account. You have a BIM 360 HQ account. And then you want to do something to access that account. You want to add or modify that data, or access it.

So each one of the apps or integrations that you want to access your account data, you have to give specific permission to. Once you've granted them permission to access your account, and the data they're in, they start to show up here. So this is your way of seeing what has access to my account and my account data.

So once again, the security of this is really important. So as an account holder, if you're an account holder and you have internal staff, or if you have external third party people, you have to grant them access to your account data. So that gives you the security that not anyone, even if they've gotten some of your information, you still have to grant them permission to access your account. So this is a really good way to secure your data.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: So, how do we get started on the BIM 360 HQ APIs? These are a typical set of workflows that you would have to follow. The first one is going to the developer.autodesk.com. And Keith will walk you through the details much later. But this is kind of an overview of the steps that are required for you to start leveraging the BIM 360 APIs.

The first thing we need to do is, like Keith mentioned, when you're creating an app, when you're creating an enterprise integration application, or you're creating a solution from ground up, the first thing you need to do is to have it registered. And for you to be able to access the APIs, the Forge APIs need to know that you are an authorized, or your app is an authorized user for that data.

The first thing you do is you create an app in Forge in developer.autodesk.com. You get a unique set of client ID and a client secret. This client ID and the secret is really tied to your application. So every time you consecutively make calls to the BIM 360 APIs, it'll make sure that the auth token that you get in return of your client ID and secret uniquely identifies you and gives you a validity of 30 minutes, after which you have to again, refresh the token. So this is how every API call needs to have the access token embedded in it so that BIM 360 or Forge really knows that your the authorized one. So that's step one.

Step two is the part that Keith just mentioned, which is you as account holders have really have to give the permission for a specific app to start leveraging your data. So in a way, even if I have created a Forge API app, I have my client ID and secret, I cannot access your account ID just because I have your go ahead. You have to give me access on my application and access so that I can start pulling in data or pushing in data.

So once as an account admin you do that step, you're basically tying in your Forge credentials with BIM 360 account, and you're good to go. So this is all you need to get started.

Once you have that set up the next thing would be start leveraging the BIM 360 APIs to do the account level administration activities, like he talked about creating projects. He talked about adding member directory inside of BIM 360. And we also talked about creating companies, business units, activation of services. So those are the account level actions that you can do once you have your app created and authorized to work on that.

And after you have the account level administration tasks done, you can then go down to each of the specific services. You can go to Field. You can go to Glue, leverage those APIs and perform your service level tasks that you need to work with. So this is an overview. We will go deep down into the details, in fact we'll see some code where we'll actually walk you through the steps on how this happens. You'll see some live code in action. But this is at an overview level.

KEITH WHITE: Awesome, all right, so now we're going to kind of start our API deep dive and demo. So the very first thing we're going to do is we need to create our Forge account and an app. Right, so before you can create your app, you have to have a Forge account. So to do that you go to developer.autodesk.com. There's a sign up button. It's very easy. You provide some personal information. And you have your account created. It's very, very easy to do. And by the way, we will be providing the slide deck after the presentation on the class page. So you'll be able to get all of this.

So once you have your, once you have your account set up, you're greeted with this page. It should be very similar to this. And it says, hey, you have an account but you don't have any apps yet. What do you want to do? So what you do is you create your first app. So whenever you create your first app, you're going to be presented with a number of BIM 360 or Forge APIs.

And so at the time that I created this screenshot, these were the three that were available. There are more available now. And there are more that are available coming in the future as they continue to roll Forge forward. So you provide an app name and an app description to your app. And that's what we discuss here. You provide a callback URL. And if you have yours, it's optional. But you can specify your own website, your URL as well.

So once you provide that very simple information, right, and this, by the way, this callback URL is for the three-legged authentication. Gosh, I can never say that word. So at the end of this, you click Create App. And now you have an app. Very, very simple to create, you got a named app. Your app will have some information associated with it, which is a key and secret associated with your particular app. So it's really that simple to just say, here's my app. Here's a name. Give me some identifying information so that I can now start to access Forge.

So you as a developer, you as a corporate owner, an account holder, you have your own app, or a third party person already has their own account and ready to go to integrate for you into your account. So you start off, you need to add an integration to your account to allow either your own company to access the data or that third party. And this is how you do it.

So when you're logged into the enterprise account, we go down to our bottom integrations button here. And you'll see that currently, in this screenshot, there are no integrations already added to the account. So if you're a brand new account holder, this is what it's going to look like for you.

So you click Add Integration. And then you're presented with a screen that says, I'm the developer. That means it's internal. You're going to give yourself access, or you're going to invite a developer. So we're going a walk through the I'm the developer, first. You're doing this for yourself.

So once you click Next, you're going to be presented with some information, relative to adding an integration. I've blurred out some stuff just for privacy sake as well, but you have a BIM 360 account ID. This is associated with your account. You need to make sure that you check this check box that says, I have saved the account ID information securely. You want to keep track of that ID because as that's what you're going to need later. You can come back to this and see what your ID is if you forget, but you really should take note of it and secure this.

You also have a Forge client ID. So when you create your own app, it's going to generate this for you, right. So a third party developer, this is going to be important because they have their own Forge client ID, or they need your Forge client ID. So you give it a name. You give it a description. You add a logo. And then you click Save. So this becomes your key to accessing the data. And when you're done, it presents you with this dialog that says, congratulations, your app is now active. And this is what it looks like.

So now inside of this app, you can go to Details, and I don't think I have a screenshot of it, but you can go to Details and you can get your key in secret. And that's what you pass through in all of your API calls. You're passing in the account ID and the key in secret. And that's what tells the Forge API, OK, this is a good app. It has access to this level of data. And we're and we're good to go.

All right, so the second option is you're an account holder, and you're going to add an integration that's from a third party developer. So you're going to allow somebody into your system. So you click on this radio button. It pops up an email address. So you type in an email address. And you click Send. And then it'll present you with a dialogue that says, invitation has been sent to, gives you the email address. And if you need to, you can click Resend the Invitation if the person doesn't get it, or if the email account doesn't get it.

Seems like I, feel like I missed a slide, there. OK, no, no, no, I'm sorry. So this is an email, right. So this is me kind of walking you through this. So this is what it looks like to the third party developer once they get the email. They get an invitation. They get a Get Started. They have a Get Started button inside the email invitation. You open it up. There's some information that's already populated, right. You check the checkbox. You've secured the information. You type in your information, provide a logo and click Save.

And now your external app has been granted access to that account holder for the level of permission and the data that they wanted you to have. There's a couple more steps in there that you'll see. But that gives you the picture.

In order to gain access to the account level information, the account holder really has to grant you that level of permission, either internal or external. So security is a real big issue because we want to make sure that everything is secure and safe. So at the end, this is what it would look like, again, for you to add a number of different integrations.

So now we're going to start to go into the API itself as a deep dive. So here, I'm going to switch over. We're going to go to do a live demo just so you can kind of see this in action how easy it. Has anyone taken a look at the Forge APIs at all yet on the web? It's a real easy way to navigate.

All right, so all I've done is gone to developer.autodesk.com. And inside of here, this is where you would click Sign Up, or Sign In after the fact, if you want to access your developer account. Menu's at the very top. There's a lot of questions about pricing. I'm not the person to answer questions about pricing. However, there is a pricing link here. You can click on that you can see what all of the pricing information is there.

So these are the current available BIM 360, or Forge APIs here on the left. You'll see that the BIM 360 APIs still listed under beta, but we're using this. This is available for you, so this is what you have access to.

So you click on this link. And then what you have here on the left is you have basically a navigation menu or panel. You have Overview, Step-by-Step Tutorials, and API References. So if you are brand new to this, this is a very helpful resource for you. So with the overview you can see some of these images we've stolen for our presentation, or kind of reused them in a similar fashion. But it's a very simple browsing experience for you to get information that you need.

So what are the APIs basics, right? If you're a desktop developer, this is where I struggled, going from pure desktop development to something that's using web development, and rest calls, and rest API, this is going to be helpful to you, just understand the basic premises. It's really straightforward and easy to do.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: Do you want to increase the font size?

KEITH WHITE: Yeah, let's see if I can make this a little bit larger so you can see. There we go. All right. So you have your Field Guide. This tells you what's available through the BIM 360 API. We're talking about projects, companies, users, and business units. So again, this is all very straightforward, gives you some ideas and understanding of what the attributes or parameters that you're going to be working with, right. What's an ID? What's the account ID? Things of that nature. What's the format of these parameters that's going to be expected?

So this is a really helpful resource for you to understand what information you need and what you're going to be interacting with. All right so that's the overview. Step-by-Step Tutorials are really helpful as well. So if you want to get started and see, how do I do something? How to access a BIM 360 account? How to create a new project, new company, activate a service? Each one of these are step-by-step tutorials for you to work through the process. So it's very simple.

You should be comfortable diving into this and exploring and finding your way through it. Once you do it once, you start to see just how easy it is. And it's really comfortable to do. Then for me, the most important thing now is the API references. And so the API reference is broken up into each one of those main categories we've talked about earlier. We have projects. We have companies. We have users, business units, and then jobs, right.

So each one of these major categories has API information. So to post a project, to add a project, create a new project, this is how you do this. This is your method, right. So it gives you your address. The supposed method gives you your endpoint that you're going to send the data to.

It also lets you know what the required header information is, what's the required parameters. We're going to talk about some of that structure in just a few minutes so you can kind of get understanding. What's the body structure of the REST request that you're going to be sending.

And so you can see here that it tells you that the name of the project, and in this case, project that you're going to be creating, it's a required attribute. You have to send the name. However, the service types associated with it is not required. But if you need or if you're tracking service types, you can push that in as well. And this tells you what kind of data it is. It's a string, right. And this gives you a description.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: So essentially what that means is you can actually create a BIM 360 project without having any services activated. So it's still a shell which doesn't have any activation of any services. It's still out there.

KEITH WHITE: You're going to hear us later recommend that at a minimum, even if you don't plan or know that you're going to use Field, Glue, Docs, any of that at this point, you go ahead and create your project, that way is easy to activate a service after the fact, because the hard work is done that the project has already been created.

So again, each one of these APIs methods to do something with your account data, create data, edit data, do something to it, is very well spelled out here and explained to any user. And so with projects, you can post a project, add a project, you can get a list of your projects. You can update projects.

So you basically have these typical methods of editing and creating data, and it includes all of these. And I'm not going to go through this. I just wanted you to see how easy it is to get to the information you need when you've never been here before. It's really helpful bit of information, very easy to navigate as well. And all of this is available at developer.autodesk.com and then under the APIs fly out.

All right, and here we will make our way back to the presentation. All right, so again, if you're an experienced developer, I'm going to apologize because this is very elementary. But I wanted to do this just so that the people who don't have experience in this understand it's really easy. Don't be afraid of this.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: Can we do a quick show of hands of who is a developer, who's written some .NET code in the past, and versus who hasn't? So this is your written code.

KEITH WHITE: I apologize.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: No, that's OK.

KEITH WHITE: So this is very elementary. And this is something that helped me. You got to remember, I started off in life as an architect. I was in the construction industry. I was a user of software, became a software developer. So some of this transition was a little bit difficult until I realized just how easy it was. All right, so using REST, right.

If I was developing something for Revit, I have all of the information available to me, based on the element that I've selected everything that's available to me right away. Well, with REST it's a little bit different. You have to send a request to a web service. That web service has to get your request. It has to accept your request. Yes, it's formatted correctly. Everything is there. Let me do something. And let me send you data back. And it all happens over a push and pull from the cloud.

So using REST, we're basically, all we're going to do is formulate a request and send it. So we're sending this to Forge. Forge is going to process it. And then it's going to send us something back in an adjacent string. So it's just a JavaScript Object Notation. It's just basically a long string. It's very similar to XML if you've ever seen it.

So we have up here, we have the Autodesk Forge platform. And down here we have a multitude of devices, whether it's a desktop computer, a tablet, or a server somewhere in your environment. So how do we get these devices, whatever they are, connected to the Forge platform? We do it through the REST API and pushing and pulling requests and responses. So it's really pretty straightforward.

So this is an example of a request and a response. So this is the request that we're building. So we're basically we're going to pass, we're going to use kind of a long URL, that we're building up the request in URL. It's going to include, the way that we're doing this is we're going to send a header, so it's got some authorisation or bearer in our token.

So when we send and we authenticate with Forge that were a valid user, where passing our account client ID and secret, we're also passing in the account ID that we're accessing. It validates that yes, we're our active user and yes we have access to this data for this account. And so that's what we're passing in here is that information.

We concatenate. We build up this string based on a specific base URL. So this is the base URL for sending request to Forge. And then we add to that the endpoint for the very specific method that we're going to be posting our request to. So in this case, we're going to hit the account. We're going to pass in the account ID for the account that we're accessing. And then we're going to do something with companies. We're going to get a list of companies back associated with that account.

And then we're going to pass in, we're going to add to that a number of parameters or attributes. And so in this case, it's just the limit and offset which says, we want to start at zero and we want to get the first 20 of these companies to come back. So you can specify ranges of things to increment your data however you need. And this is just a very simple example.

So we send that up to Forge. Forge processes it and sends us back a response. And this is what this response looks like. And it's basically one long run-on sentence, very similar XML, but it tells us this is the ID that we're working on. And by the way, this is not a real ID. It's just me typing in numbers. This is the account ID, right. This is the name of the company, right. AEC technology consultants, what's the trade. So it starts to give us this information.

Then if you want to make this more human readable, you can post this into an adjacent visualizer. And it just basically breaks it up into these objects. And you can see that this is the parameter. This is a value, parameter, value. So this is all this doing. It's sending it back. And then you just parse that information. It's really very simple to do. You just need to understand how to build up your objects whenever you're writing your code to handle that data as it gets serialized and deserialized.

All right, so now, having that very generic explanation of build a request, all we're going to do is basically build out a real long URL with some parameters in strings, and then we're going to post that to Forge. We're going to get a response back in adjacent string. And that adjacent string, you can then do something with. So you can review that data, iterate over it, and decide to change it, push back a different request with a new bit of information. So this is how this works.

And so at this point we're going to walk you through a code demo of a project of how you can create projects, companies, users. So this is how you would connect your ERP system, if a SharePoint, or if it's CMIC. Whatever it is, when you create a project on your environment, you can trigger an event that pushes this data right up to the Forge BIM 360 platform as well so that you don't have to enter the data twice.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: Thanks Keith. So essentially, like Keith just mentioned, and again for a lot of the audience here who have not seen .NET code this might feel overwhelming. I think if you can walk out of this class knowing that there is a lot of standard code that's out there, that your developers or yourself can look at, leverage, again, we'll be sharing some of these code snippets that you can also bake in with your sample code that you're trying to write.

You can essentially come up with a small list of tasks in your head so that you know, essentially, that these are the things that you need to do to make an authenticated call, get the data, fetch the data, or write something back to it. And again, I apologize because this might be a little bit of the weeds because a lot of the people here are not really written any .NET code. But I think for the audience who have written some code, again, this is for you to say that it's, again, very easy, it's REST. And again, you've seen how the format looks like, what are the APIs calls, what do you pass in, and what do you get.

So at this point, what we have done is we have created a very simple esp.net application. You can imagine this to be an application that you are building up from ground up, or it's an application which is part of your ecosystem, which is constantly fetching, or pushing, or pulling the data between your ERP system and the BIM 360 Forge cloud itself.

So you can have multiple use cases that you can fit for this demo. We said, let's create a simple esp.net application. Let's try and imagine if you are trying to recreate BIM 360 by ourselves. Because if you roll back for the first 10 minutes of this class, we talked about how Forge is giving you access to the web services. And BIM 360 itself is leveraging those web services. So what if we create in the esp.net application, which accesses the same web services, and you kind of have the same functionality within an esp.net application that's all yours. You don't have to go into BIM 360.

So what we have done here is, again, we're trying to tie-in things that you've seen in the slides in the actual call. So you might have a jog in your mind between what you saw in a few other slides before this, and what you will see now embedded in the code itself.

So for example, like Keith mentioned, first is the default URL. We have kind of set this up at a global constant, saying, we know we have to constantly work with this endpoint. Let's just create as a constant. We have also included the specific endpoint for the authentication.

And again, this is part of the Forge web service, this is not BIM 360 at this point. This is the underlying Forge authentication that you would have to do for any app that you create, irrespective of whether it's a BIM 360 app, or a recap app, or anything that's out there, or just the viewer.

So the first endpoint is the authentication endpoint. And the next one is very specific to BIM 360. Again, we have set these up at a global level so that we can constantly use these instead of having to type in or write in in every instance that we're using this. OK.

What we've also done is we have rolled you, we have talked through how you can create an application, get it authorized to work with your account, and we need to tie all of this together in the code as well. So the three things that you see here are, again, we are tying in the account ID, which is very specific to the account that we are working with.

And in your case, it will be your own account. So your BIM 360 HQ, whenever you log in you enable an app. You've given authorization for an app to start leveraging your data. You'll get the account ID just like Keith had shown you. You embed that in the account ID. And then you put in the client ID and secret. Again, we need this because we need to have an authorized ticket on an auth token every time you make an app API call.

So let me start up Internet Explorer. What we have done here is created a simple esp.net application, like I mentioned before. The UI is very esp.net specific. But the functionality is exactly what you have in BIM 360 HQ. Again, we have not baked the entire BIM 360 HQ user interface functionality into here, but given you enough pieces that you can imagine that this is how HQ works with the APIs working under the hood.

So for example, let me start over the project. And in this case, let me say, we are creating an extension of this portal itself. Let's say it's a convention center. Again, this drop-down is something that's a smaller set of what HQ or BIM 360 really supports, but just for demonstration purposes, and let's say this is a convention center. Let's just say we are building up only few extensions, it's few convention rooms at this point. This is the budget that we have. Let's just go with the contract type. Again, these are some things that you would find in the user interface itself.

We now say, when is the start date of the project. Let's assume the project starts off today. When is the end date? Again, Rome wasn't built in a day. Let's assume we will get this done within a month, which is a month from now. And again, job ID, lets for now, again, this is where you would tie-in, if you have job ID in your ERP system, this is where you would put that data in so that everything is connected together in your enterprise. So for our sample applications, let's just say its 11/16/2016. Project address, let me just put in our San Rafael headquarters address.

KEITH WHITE: So while Saikat types and the address and this bit of information, imagine if your ERP system would trigger an event and collect all this data, you enter it once and it goes to your ERP system as well as Forge. So that's the idea. You wouldn't have to type this in multiple times. You're doing it once, collecting that data. And then we're going to use, we're showing you this in Fields, but you're going to pass it through as Attributes behind the scenes.

SAIKAT BHATTACHARYA: So once I have created the project, I can actually just go in and say Create the Project. This is where we were saying, you can always have a shell BIM 360 project without having any of these services, like Field, or Glue, or Docs enabled.

At this point, for the purposes of this demonstration, let me say, it's a BIM 360 Field project. And let me just say that I am the admin of this specific service within this project. And this will enable us to activate the service. To activate the service, you would see that you need End Project Admin. And this is exactly what I'm trying to do with the UI, with the custom UI.

So once I click on Create Project, this is where you'll see a lot of Visual Studio, which was used as an IDE for developing this code. Again, it's an esp.net code. We'll be leveraging some tools, like the RestSharp Libraries, which make it very easy for us to start working with the REST APIs.

But as you can see, the first thing we did was on the click of a button, I put in some custom functionality where I'm actually accessing the client ID and the secret. We need the client ID and the secret, again, repeating, so that we can get a valid auth token from Forge. So let me walk you through the first step.