Integrate BIM 360 Within Your Enterprise with Forge

SHERYL YANG: All right, we're getting started. Good morning and welcome everyone to this session. Today, we will be talking about integrating BIM 360 into your enterprise using Autodesk Forge.

My name is Sheryl Yang. I'm a solution architect was Autodesk Consulting Team my background is construction management and BIM. Currently at Autodesk, my primary responsibility is to work with our AEC Enterprise customers to integrate and extend the BIM 360 capabilities with Autodesk Forge. Today I'm joined by Judd and Mona. So why don't you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves?

JUDD FUOTO: Good morning, everyone. I'm Judd Fuoto with Southland Industries. I'm a senior analyst in the innovations team with AEC technologies, so I do a lot of the research and development work going on at Southland Industries.

MONA JALILZADEH: Hello everyone. I'm Mona. I'm technical consultant at Autodesk. I've been at Autodesk for three years. My primary focus is Forge. And I do a lot of customization and integration for our customers. All right.

SHERYL YANG: All right. So today we have three things, or topics, in our session. We'll be talking about, what is BIM 370 and Forge? And more importantly, what has been done with BIM 360 and Forge? And so Judd will be sharing with us some experiences with sales and industries as how they are using BIM 360 and Forge. And then we will share some examples and ideas as to what you can do with BIM 360 and Forge, hopefully to give you guys some directions, or inspirations, or examples that you will find applicable to your company.

All right, so first of all real quick, overview about BIM 360 and Forge. I'm sure most of you have heard about Forge, which is a next Autodesk platform. So Forge is like web services, a collection or web services that are created from Autodesk software libraries that are made available to you guys as the partners of Autodesk or customers of Autodesk to use to build your own applications or integrate with Autodesk applications. So you can sync Forge web services as LEGO building blocks that you can use to build different things.

Let me give you an example of, what do I mean by building block for software application? So, let's use the Model Viewer for example. The building block of software can be shared across different industries across different software applications.

So regardless you are in [INAUDIBLE] industry, or manufacturing industry, or other industries, as long as you need to see a 3D model-- it could be a building model, or a bridge model, or a car model, or a mechanical part model-- you need a viewer to see the model. So that is a basic building block that can be sheared across industries. So the viewer is just one example that is part of the web services that Forge provide.

And what does BIM 360 have to do with Forge, then? So I'm sure a lot of you have heard that the new BIM 360 products, or next generation of BIM 370 services, are being built on top of the Forge platform. So really, the building blocks that I was talking about as part of Forge provides foundation services that our engineering team, the Autodesk product teams, are using to build the BIM 360 services that can connect and support different construction workflows such as field management, or model coordination, or project management, or cost control. So we are moving into this one BIM 370 platform.

So a lot of the BIM 360 products that you guys are familiar with today, such as Field, Glue, Docs-- they are all merging into one BIM 360 platform. So they will become modules, or rather services, that support different construction workflows. And in addition, at the bottom you notice that we have a lot of logos for other companies or software applications. So Forge gives us the capability of extracting the data out of BIM 360 platform, or leveraging the models and data that is already existing in the BIM 360 platform, and make the data talk to other applications or extend the BIM 360 capabilities with other applications.

So a lot of these new BIM 360 integrations are already part of the BIM 360 account and the Administration Portal. I will show that in a bit. So what I just talked about in last slide is where BIM 360 is moving in the future, or its been moved or been built on top of the Forge platform. So this slide, I want to show you where BIM 360 stands today, as opposed to Forge.

The ones that are highlighted in orange are the ones that are part of Forge. And the ones that are in blue are the existing BIM 360 products, or the classic BIM 360 products. As of today, they are outside of Forge. So for example, Field and Glue-- but they are around the first ones to be re-engineered and be moved into Forge platform.

So for those of you who are part of the BIM 360 insider program or the beta testing program, you should have heard about Field Management module within BIM 360, or model coordination module within BIM 360. They are actually the next generation of BIM 360 Field and Glue. As I mentioned, there will be one BIM 360 platform which provide different services. So as of today, for the existing or classic BIM 360 products, even though they're not fully part of Forge, but they do have APIs that allow us to integrate and extend their capabilities as well.

All right, so really what you can do with BIM 360 and Forge? What are the examples or use cases? So I want to share with you some of the success stories, or the examples that we have built for our enterprise customers which have been proven to be successful to our AEC customers to achieve their enterprise objectives, such as improving their operational efficiency through integration, enable better decision making through data visualization and analytics, and also to enable customized workflows. So of course there will be more examples or use cases up to your imagination as to how you want to use Forge. But today, we will be focusing on giving you examples from those three aspects.

So first of all, let's talk about integration. So we know that Autodesk is now the only software provider that the enterprise customers, you guys, work with. There are a lot of other applications, or software solutions, or platforms, out there in your company or enterprise IT infrastructure environment. So what Forge allows us to do is to integrate the Autodesk data with other applications that you are using today in your enterprise, so that we can reduce the data re-entering, to ensure the data accuracy, to provide a single source of truth, and then connect the people and the process.

So we have examples of integrating BIM 360 with the ERP system to move the data seamlessly between different applications. We can also synchronize our documents that are part of BIM 360 with other possible document management applications you may have today. We can also help the data handover process to move the asset data from AEC applications to facilities management applications. And lastly, we can also integrate the data on models that are stored on Autodesk Cloud with your on-premise web server or file server to ensure the data integrity.

So next I'll be handing over the presentation to Judd. And Judd will actually be sharing with us an example of connecting Autodesk Cloud for a collaboration for Revit, and integrate that with their file server for the model backup purpose. OK, Judd.

JUDD FUOTO: Good morning again, everyone. So, before I get started into what we did I want to answer, who is Southland Industries? Some of you may have heard of us. We're a large MEP systems contractor. But we're more than that. We are a building solutions provider with custom solutions and connected solutions that tie together design engineering, fabrication, construction, and building service.

So knowing that, why is Southland Industries moving to the cloud? First of all, access to information. We have offices all around the country. And beyond that, we have job sites in even more locations around the country. And everyone needs access to accurate information, knowing that what they have is the most up to date information out there.

They need it available anywhere. Again, we have offices in Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Garden Grove California, Union City California, Laurel, Maryland, Sterling, Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and then other smaller satellite locations and countless construction sites around the country. So we need information anywhere. And it needs to be clear. People on a job site need to know that the information they have is accurate, easily read, easily digested, and not a roll of papers with dirt and coffee all over it and whatever else you're going to find on a construction site.

In addition, the efficiencies that are realized from moving to the cloud. So, it minimizes IT infrastructure. You don't have to have your on premise servers. You don't have to spend all this time updating your servers all the time to keep up with increased speeds and increased demand. And it helps to minimize the replication, the lag and replication-- again, all of those office locations that I had mentioned plus job sites-- having to replicate files to all those different servers, and the lag that that causes.

So knowing all that, why use Forge? Well, Southland Industries has a strategic vision with a lot of applications that we want to do, work that we want to enable, on job sites and in our offices. And being so spread across the country, being able to work together and collaborate. In integrating with some of the applications that we use, Sheryl already mentioned in a previous slide some of the integrations that are possible. So things like your ERP system and other hosted platforms that all of us use.

There's a readily available API for all the different applications that are built on Forge using the Forge application. So additionally, we have a partnership with Autodesk. And we have built custom applications with them before. And in this instance, the Collaboration for Revit backup utility was one that we wanted to build. Now I know what you're thinking. Collaboration for Revit, cloud application-- so why go to Collaboration for Revit?

Well, there's a continued theme here. We're nationwide. We want to enable collaboration. And Collaboration for Revit helps with that, with design engineering services and some of our construction services and fabrication for remote employees and for outside consultants. It makes it a lot easier for everyone to collaborate together and keep a live model and develop designs together. And again, no on premise servers.

So for every job site where someone needs to access a model, we don't have to build a server there and host another server in an office location or another satellite location. And then we don't have to replicate files to all those different servers all around the country. So if Collaboration for Revit is a cloud hosted application, it's all in the cloud. Why would you build a backup utility for the cloud?

Well, that's a great question. At least I think so. At Southland we have a document retention policy of 10 years. For legal reasons we have to keep everything for at least 10 years. And all documents need to be archive together.

So that backup utility, it allows for archiving everything together in one location for as long as we need to, even longer than 10 years if necessary. And also, it provides file backup restoration. When you're working in a high trust environment where you have external business consultants and business partners working in there, some may be more familiar with Revit than others. Sometimes there can be lost work, deleted files, corrupted files. And you need to have a backup plan in case anything goes wrong. At least, we had decided that.

So the gap of backing up models locally, again as I've said before, the replication lag. There we go. So in this over here, it's showing five different locations with a central server. Well, as I mentioned we have more than five different locations. We have more than that just in offices, and satellite locations, and construction sites. So imagine if this web over here was, let's just be conservative and say two dozen locations that you're having to replicate.

And that doesn't necessarily take into account any external business partners working with you. Well, with Collaboration for Revit it's all in one location that everyone can look at. Everyone can work together. So having that backup, pulling from a cloud application, just made it easier for us. It's one location and not having to pull various files from all over all these different servers and consolidate.

So the solution that we developed, it's a web hosted up using Forge APIs. And it's on a custom backup schedule that we can customize whenever we want-- full backups, partial backups, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, whenever we want to set it. And it's mapped directly to a central Windows server, Southland hosted Windows server, so that we can access it locally if we need to. And it's scalable to any Forge based products. So any of the Forge based BIM 360 products, we can scale to that as well.

So this is a basic map of what it is. So with Collaboration for Revit, pulling from BIM 360 TEAM using Forge, it will download the models, go to our scheduler, Windows service, back up to a file server, and-- admittedly this part here, Sheryl and Mona are way better suited to talk about it than me. So I'm not going to embarrass myself up here with that.

So why did we use Autodesk Consulting? Why did Southland say, let's use Autodesk Consulting? Well, Southland has an enterprise business agreement with Autodesk. So we were already working with them on a variety of other things. And we have a great relationship.

We've collaborated on other applications in the past, that I've mentioned before. And we wanted to leverage their expertise. There are other people, other developers, other companies, out there that can provide similar services but they're working with Forge, they're developing these applications in Forge, and they have teams that are well-qualified to develop and work with us.

So what was the process at Southland industries? How did we decide to go about doing this? Why did we decide, let's build a Collaboration for Revit backup utility? So we have, at Southland Industries, a Project Management Office that we called PMO for technology project governance. And what it does is, it ensures that all new technologies, tools, processes, anything that we implement on the technology project side, brings value to the business in some way or another based on a business case brought to us by the business and then we work to put together a solution.

So there are five phases to this process. It's first, demand. And that's where we get feedback from the business. We get their input. And we start to put together the business case. So in this instance, with the backup utility, Southland Industries, internally we recognized the business case and built that.

The next phase is analysis. So once we have a business case built, we begin to work together and analyze different solutions, different tools, what's available, what is out there, and if we need to go with something new. And in this case, Autodesk worked with Southland Industries to go through the analysis phase.

Next, we have the design phase where we start to design the tool, the process, whatever we're going to put in place. And for the backup utility, Autodesk put together-- they built design specs for us and did UI mockups so that we could see what we were going to be getting, see what we were going to be developing.

The next phase of the PMO is the build phase. And that's after we have everything-- well, we have the business case. We've analyzed what's out there. We begin to design it, then we build it. And in this case, the Autodesk team, they hosted sprint meetings to make sure that what was being developed met the business requirements. And they were hosted in a regular enough interval that if any adjustments needed to be made, there wasn't so much work done that had to be undone, redone, discarded altogether.

And lastly, we have the implement phase. And so after everything is built, we begin to implement. And in this case, Autodesk put together all the support documentation that we needed so that anyone, any admin with access to this backup utility at Southland, had the documentation and didn't need to go through rigorous training in order to back up the models that they need backed up. Make sure that they don't mess anything up for anyone else, which would kind of betray the whole purpose of having this tool, this utility.

So that is the process that we went through. And now I will hand this back over to Sheryl to get a little bit more in-depth. Thank you.

SHERYL YANG: So I'll continue the discussion about integration. So one other example I was talking about is to integrate BIM 360 with your ERP system. So we have a lot of success stories with a lot of our construction customers off integrating BIM 360 HQ or the account administration with their ERP system. The BIM 360 HQ is one single platform, that's one company. The account admin can go and create new projects, activate BIM 360 services or add in project members.

It also provides the consolidated, master directory of all your projects or your companies, partner companies that you work with on different projects, and also the entire master directory of the users that you have in your BIM 360 account. So using the BIM 360 APIs that are part of the Forge platform, we are able to integrate the project creation process, the member directory, the company directory, with the ERP system, such as CMIC or Coins which are the typical ERP systems that are used by our construction customers.

So one example is for project creation. So the ERP system is typically where a new project is initiated. When you have a bidding opportunity you create a new project. And other key project information is also initiated in the ERP system, such as you have a job ID assigned, a project name, project value, contractor type, the date, et cetera. So the information of the project can be automatically synchronized and pushed into BIM 360 account administration. So a new project of BIM 360 will be created automatically with no human touching between, which eventually reduce the overhead for admin person to go through a process again entering the same project information again in multiple places.

And also, the values that you bring to the project team is, the project members don't need to wait for a couple of days, send the emails to project admins asking to create a BIM 360 project for them. So really improving the data quality as well as improving the efficiency and reducing the admin overhead. So another example is a company directory. So we have seen some issues with duplicated company data in the BIM 360 HQ, where the project admins at the project level are creating the same companies with different names instances because people have different naming conventions for the same thing. And you end up having 10 different instances in your BIM 360 HQ for the same company.

So that issue can be prevented if we can integrate BIM 360 HQ all the account administration with your ERP system. Because your ERP system is where you have all those partner companies you work with. So in this case, if we have the company directory populated in BIM 370 from using the data in your ERP system, and then for the project teams that want to add a new company to their project, they only need to search and pull down what's available in your BIM 360 account. So there will be no need for them to manually create another instance which may end up being a duplicate.

So we do have another session that will be hosted by one of our customers later in construction. They're CIO and also one of my colleagues, Keith White. They will be talking in more details about their success stories or case studies of integrating BIM 360 HQ with ERP system. They have CMIC. So if you want to find more about the success stories, I strongly recommend you guys go to the afternoon session to hear more about experiences with Layton Construction.

Another example we have for integration is document synchronization. So BIM 360 Docs is where you manage all the project files and drawings on models for a construction project. But if you do have other document management applications that helping implement in your company, we can do this seamless synchronization between BIM 360 and Dropbox, [INAUDIBLE] Box, or SharePoint, or OneDrive or Google Drive so that you don't need to manually migrate or upload the same files or models again to BIM 360 Docs.

Actually, as of today if you go just Google Autodesk App Store, and it will see a menu on the left hand side with different Autodesk products. We have a special section for BIM 360. And there are already a handful of document synchronization apps that are built by our team which is readily available for you to synchronize documents between BIM 360 and the other document management applications.

So another big thing that is happening for BIM 360 integration is, we have an app store within the BIM 360 account administration. So this is new that was just announced yesterday as part of the Forge devcon. So if you have a BIM 360 enterprise account, account admin can go there and there is a special path.

There is a path for apps or integration where you will see the featured BIM 360 integration apps that are built by our partners or third party developers. We do go through the security check process, making sure they have the good code and it's secure for adding those apps into your BIM 360 account. Now this gives the BIM 360 enterprise customers a seamless experience of seeing what's available out there and you can pick and choose what will be beneficial and add that to your BIM 360 account.

And next example-- so, what we have just talked about is all about integration. So another aspect that you can leverage Forge for getting data or a model outside of Docs, is you enable better decision making with data visualization and analytics. So this is how a model looks like in BIM 360 Docs. It's a web browser but it does not only have those cool, good looking 3D geometry of a model. It also has all the intelligent information behind the scenes.

So this is an example of a Revit model. So it provides me the model hierarchy code tree, where I can navigate different Revit categories, families, types, instances. And if I pick an object it's also going to give me all the properties or the attributes of the object that is created in Revit platform. So all the intelligent data is maintained and carried over when a source model is translated into the Forge viewer, which is used by BIM 360 Docs. And all this intelligent information, the data, is also accessible through our Forge APIs.

So this is another example that you can find today in Autodesk App Store. It shows, really, the power of Forge APIs and the Forge viewer. So you can just log into this web app. And it's going to give you the available BIM 360 accounts and projects that you have. If you pick a model, it's going to show you the Model Viewer in the middle, and also report out the quantities of the model in this nice visualization diagram on the right hand side. So you can easily see the quantities of your model elements broken down by the type or the levels or different attributes.

So to take this further, a further step, see the information in your model is all available, accessible to you. We can also take the information out and put the model data into a database environment so it has SQL database, which you can connect to your enterprise business intelligence application to do all kinds of analytics, customize your data analytics. I do have one quick video to show you the example, where I just did a quick proof of concept which shows the end to and workflow to pull the model information from a model that is sitting in Docs and then pushing the model properties into a SQL database which is connected to Power BI application. And then I compared the quantities of two versions of a model to see the difference.

All right, video is playing. So this is a Docs project. I created a special project for our class. And I uploaded a handful of models into this project. So we are looking at an architecture model now. And now I move to a custom sample application.

So those applications are open source. So if you go to our Forge website, you will find this application and you can run it or extend it. So what I did is, I add this button here to push the model properties into Azure database. As you can see, all these models and model trees, the properties are retrieved from Docs. So this is how the data looks like in a SQL database.

It's all pure data. Each line item is a model element. And I have the motto attributes, such as levels and materials and other key properties. So now this is a Power BI application that I use to connect to a SQL server or a SQL database on Microsoft Azure. And then I pulled the data down to the Power BI application.

As you can see, when I'm connecting to the database, the same data I was showing you in the SQL environment is exactly the same that is provided to Power BI. So now, after the connection the data is in. And then I will have kinds of folders that are parsed from the database. And then I can-- all this is part of the Power BI. I can filter.

In says I'm going to generate a bar chart for comparing the quantities of wall elements. Te quantities in this case are the areas of the walls. And then the different colors represent two versions of the model. So I can easily see that in one version of the models we have more quantities of walls on the lower level, and another level here. So each bar chart are broken up by different levels or floors in that model.

So you can easily see the differences of the quantities between two versions of a model. So how you want to analyze it, or breaking it up, is completely up to you because the data is all available in the database. So after seeing this, it's going to drive more business insights. For example, you got a better understanding as to how different design iterations, or design alternatives, are making an impact on the model quantities, eventually the cost of the project or the building.

And next I'm going to hand it over to Mona. Mona will talk about how you can leverage BIM 360 and Forge to extend all those product capabilities by doing customization.

MONA JALILZADEH: Thank you. Thank you. Hello again. So, I'm very happy to be here today. I'm going to show you some tips and tricks on how you can extend and leverage BIM 360 product capabilities and features. So we're going to get a little bit technical, not too much. Hopefully it's going to keep a good balance.

All right, so let's start with extending BIM 360 capabilities. For this section, I prepared a sample. I developed this sample application. It's a custom application to show how we can extend BIM 360 Field capability using Forge Viewer.

So I'm sure most of you are familiar with BIM 360 Field already. BIM 360 Field is a cloud based construction data management platform. It's a great product. It offers a lot of different APIs that allows for integration and customization. So in the app that I'm going to show you, what we're going to do is, we're going to get the data from your BIM Field. And then we're going to view it in the Forge Viewer.

So that's going to help to visualize the data. That's how we're going to extend BIM 60 Field capability and add another visual side to it to take full advantage of that. So this is just an example of how you can extend it. This is not supposed to limit you on what you can do. This is just going to give you some idea of what you can do with BIM 360 Field and Forge Viewer.

So I'm going explain a little bit of what this application is going to do. This application has to drop down list box. The first one is going to drag the information of your projects from your BIM 360 Field, depending on your permissions and what are the projects that you are part of. And then when you select a project, the location drop down list box is going to load all the location available to that particular project. By selecting the location, in our case it's going to be floor names. When you select a floor, you're going to see the models start loading, the 2D model, the 3D model. And then the data is going to show up.

So that data is going to be the same data from BIM Field. We are using BIM 360 Field APIs to just communicate and get those data and display it in our custom application. And I'm going to go through some screenshots to explain a little bit. And then I'm going to play a short video to see how the workflow is. And we're going to play around with the app in the video.

So on the left hand side bottom is my custom application. It's, again, a web page that I developed for this demo. And on the top in the corner right, you're seeing screenshots from BIM 360 Field. So as you can see, the project name is coming directly from your BIM 360 Field account. And on the right hand side, you see the locations that are listed on BIM 360 field. And that is exactly the same as the location we have in our down list box.

So here, when you select a floor it's exactly the same as if in BIM 360 Field, you use the search and filter based on location. As you can see, we getting the exact same result of issues. So on the right hand side is the custom app showing all the issues on third floor. On the left hand side, again, they're all the issues that belong to that particular floor.

So the data, I chose to just limit the data that we are displaying. So I just pick a few columns from BIM Field. I didn't care about the rest in this particular demo app. However, I also have a custom column. If you can see on the very first column in my custom app, I have a column that has colors. So this is where I'm trying to customize the workflow.

In my case, I'm using a custom property. And I defined a custom property, defining what color each issue has to be. But you can do it anyhow you want. You can do it based on the status of the issue. If it's open it's red, if it's closed it's green.

You can do it based on the priority and risk. You can do it if it's a high risk, you want it to be it ed. Or you can also define your own custom property that makes sense only to you and your team.

So what is this color coding is going to help is that when we are loading to 2D model, immediately the color of the room is highlighted in the same color as that issue. So that's going to help you visualize as soon as you see the model without having to skim through all the data, reading all the properties, sorting them, filtering them, to understand what is open, what is important. You can just take a look at the model and know, what are the rooms that have issues? And what are the most important issues that they're open? Or what is the issue that is already past due?

And in this article are screenshot, as you can see, we are using the basement mechanical room. That is on the top right corner. It's blue. And in the data field, the issue also is showing with blue color.

So this is the video that I'm going to play. So we have two tabs open. The first one is BIM 360 Field. The second one is our custom app. Selecting Project, Location, and now the model is coming up. You see the data at the bottom.

So you can see all the colors on 2D sheet immediately when the model is loaded. Again, just by one look you can tell what are the rooms with issues, what are the issues that they're open, and anything else. And then they're all synced together. You can search in one or the other and it's going to show you.

If you're interested in searching by string, you can search it by string. And when you click on it, it's going to highlight the room, showing you where that issue is. Or you can do it the opposite way. You can just click on that particular room and see all the issues assigned to that room.

And of course, this is all in sync with BIM 360 Field. So you don't have to worry about maintaining the data. You don't have to change anything if something changes in BIM 360 Field, because we are using API and we are extracting data directly from BIM Field. So if you go, we're going to see a little bit farther that we are going to update something in BIM 360 Field. And we're going to see that reflected in our custom application.

That's a very important issue, something is wrong. So we're going to change that. And then you're going to see that that's going to get reflected in your custom app. So again, BIM 360 Field is a great product. But you can extend it using other Autodesk product, in my example using Forge Viewer. And this is just one simple sample of what you can do.

So now we're just going to filter for that particular-- actually, we're going to click on that room and see that the description changed. So it's all synced. And it's going to help, this particular application is read only application. So a lot of managers, they don't want to be in a complicated view with a lot of fields, and they are afraid of people deleting things or editing by mistake. This is view only. So if you just want to see the issues and you don't want to modify anything, this is a great tool that you can just use as a custom application that you can use and track those information.

So now that we have some idea about how we can extend BIM 360 capabilities, let's see how we can leverage Autodesk product features to save some time and to reduce the cost. So in this particular example, I'm going to talk to you about a case scenario that is going to help you optimize your custom application using BIM 360 Docs and Forge Viewer. We're going to come back to this slide again at the end.

So right now if you want to have a custom web browser, web application, that you want to have Forge Viewer, in order for you to get the model from your desktop to show up in your web application and to view it in the Forge Viewer, there are steps that you have to take. So, you have to create a bucket. You can consider that bucket like a visual placeholder that you're going to store your models in. And then you have to upload your models into that bucket.

And then after that, you have to translate that model to something that is understandable by the Viewer. So Viewer can read the property, Viewer can read the model and display it, which is all good. There are APIs. Forge offers a lot of APIs that does everything for you. However, if you already have BIM 360 Docs account and you already have your models there, the good news is that BIM 360 Docs is doing all of this for you and is saving a lot of time.

So, we're going to talk about how we can get the model from BIM 360 Docs to show up in Viewer without having to do all those API calls. The other aspect of this is that I know some customers, some people, are interested in folder structure. With bucket, creating the bucket, your model is going to be all flat in one folder, you can imagine.

But if you're interested in folder structure, you can use BIM 360 Docs to upload your models there and just use them in Forge Viewer, because in BIM 360 Docs we have a folder structure. You can have as many nested folders as you want. And you can properly organize your models.

All right, so before we get started let me explain what Viewer needs in order to display your model. So, we call that URN. URN stands for Uniform Resource Name. If you're not familiar with it, you can think of it as a URL that you use, like Autodesk.com. It's supposed to be unique. And if you enter the URL in your browser, it's going to take you to a website.

No matter how many times you refresh Autodesk.com, you're going to get the same website. URN is the same thing. One URN belongs to to one model. So when we are giving the URN to the Viewer, no matter how many times we refresh, Viewer is going to load the same model for you.

And that is a very long string. It's not really meaningful to us when we are reading it. But Viewer understand that. So we're going to talk about how we can retrieve that model URN from BIM 360 Docs and use it in Forge Viewer.

URN in BIM 360 world, we call it derivative ID. So when we are going through these screenshots you're going to see that at the end, the value that we are retrieving called derivative ID. So these are some of the APIs that we have to use. But the good news is that if you already have BIM 360 Docs, all these APIs are included in your Enterprise Package. So you're not going to pay anything in addition. And you're going to develop this once and use it forever.

And if you're familiar with coding, you know that this is not complicated. But if you're not, you can ask your developers to explain to you how easy it is to put together something to do these APIs for you. All right, so we're going to get the hub first. So, when you want to get that item from the BIM Field, we have to first understand what hub these models belong to.

And then when you have the hub ID, you have to get the project ID because that hub has hundreds of projects underneath, right? So you have to find the projects that you're working on and get that project ID. In a lot of cases, you are working on that particular project and you already know what is the project ID. So you can skip the first two calls getting the hub ID and project ID, because all we are interested in is that project ID.

So here we are getting the hub ID. And that highlighted there is the ID. So we are going to get that ID and we are going to use it in the next call, which is project ID. So we are using that hub ID and getting the list of all the projects. Let's assume that the project that we are working on is AU Project.

So we find the name of the project called AU Project. We grab the ID. And now we are going to make another call to get folders in that particular project. So you might have a lot of folders, depending on your type of project. Again, this call is going to return a bunch of information and you need to find the folder that you need and get the ID for that particular folder.

And finally, when you have the folder ID you are going to just make the last call and saying that you want all the content of that folder. That obviously is going to return a lot of information, because your folder is going to have folders, other items, and it's going to have your model. So when you get that information you just scroll down, you spot your model. This is going to be the model name that you're interested in.

It's the same model that Sheryl earlier demoed. And then when you scroll down, there are a lot of attributes that it's very interesting if you want to use it in other custom solutions. But you're going to finally find the attribute derivative ID. And this is a URN. So this is the string I was talking about.

And this is, when you pass this to your Viewer and your Viewer is going to load the model for you. So it's going to save you a lot of steps, a lot of time. And you don't have to pay anything for it because it's included in your package. So if you're a developer, you can have a very simple HTML page and test that URN. Just paste it as your URN and test your application to see the model.

If you're not a developer, that's OK. We have this URL. It's very simple. Just enter that URL in your browser and replace that blue field, the token, with your access token, and the URN with the URN we just retrieved from earlier. And then hit Enter and you're going to see your model, exact model that you have in BIM 360 Docs, and all the sheets that they are underneath.

So, on the left hand side is that model in BIM Field. We have the postman down there. We're making calls. This is what the last call, the content call, returns. And we grab that ID.

And that's the URL I just showed you. I pasted that URN in that URL and hit Enter. And that's the model that, again, Sheryl was showing you earlier. So, I'm going to share some useful resources with you.

But before that, I would like to tell you that I covered a couple of examples about customization. But when it comes to Forge platform, don't allow yourself or anyone at AU to limit you to what you see. We are just trying to help you, give you some idea of what is possible. And none of these-- you are not limited to these.

You can go farther. Just take whatever we tell you and try to build something that is good for your environment and works for your company. So I'm going to share some of my favorite resources. If you're already working with Forge, you probably know all of them. But if you just started working with them, you need to bookmark those because you're going to go back to them a lot.