topic Re: Create or Duplicate Hubs using the API. in BIM 360 API Forum

Create or Duplicate Hubs using the API.

franciscopossetto — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 12:50:35 GMT

Hello everyone,

I am fairly new to working with the Forge's API and BIM 360. I was researching about how to create or duplicate HUB's with the API. What I found was that using the Data Management API we only are able to GET hubs. Is that the final answer? Are there any other API that give us this ability?

Thanks in advance,

Kind regards.

Re: Create or Duplicate Hubs using the API.

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 03:16:45 GMT

Hi Francisco,

If I understand correctly, you have a BIM360 hub for Org-X and now you want to clone the entire hub (projects and its content) to a different one for Org-X2. From that premise, I can tell you that it is partially possible and it will get hairy fast. I would avoid having to do this at all cost. Just replying to have fun by going thru the process. I have many questions, but let's try to create a plan first. There may be services that get you close, but I doubt they can do a 1:1 duplication. We coded a good portion of what I mention below because we managed a migration from Team to Doc Management. I can tell you it will not be as easy as using GET hub and then POST hub 😉

1. Get all projects, members, companies, roles and business units from Org-X using the BIM 360 API (2 legged token). If you only care about the projects, disregard the rest

2. Using Data management API get "top folders" and write a recursive method to read all folders in a project. If you care about replicating folder permissions, too, this could be a good time for writing to an external database permissions (BIM 360 Permissions API beta) applied to every folder. Also, while looping thru folders, you may like to start collecting folder content/items and their Storage ids to download files later. Optionally, there are RFIs, Issues, Custom Attributes and a couple of more things you can collect.

3. We have storage ids, now, let's download the project files. Nope! You could be downloading an outdated Revit model because what you get thru the doc management is the latest PUBLISHED model. Before downloading, we will need to publish all models in the project. We have a script for this for our hub. It is good, but not perfect. Once, this is done you could download the models to a storage.

By omitting a bunch of things in between, just to keep this post readable, we could start duplicating projects in the new hub (Org-X2) on the next step.

4. Create project/s and folder structures, invite members, companies, assign folder permissions, etc

5. Upload all non-cloud work-shared files(PDFs, DWGs, NWD, non-cloud RVT, etc) to its corresponding folder in the project. Repeat for each project obviously.

6. Find out the Revit version of the cloud models in the project

7. You could write a dynamo script or plugin that opens each Revit file and does the collaboration to cloud to the right project and folder (I think this is true from Revit 2019). Prefer manually.

Well, you can tell that it you could even try to reload links as well.

Not sure if I actually responded your question or "me fui por la tangente". Further questions: is this a one time thing? Do you just need to create a back up? Are you trying to run to hubs in parallel?

Good luck,

Re: Create or Duplicate Hubs using the API.

franciscopossetto — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 13:33:33 GMT

Hey Xavier,

Thank you for taking the time to write all this explanation. It was really clear. I will try to replicate the process you described.

Regarding to one of your questions, I don't have too much details about the requirement, it was just a question I was asked but I assume that it's just a one time thing. In the case I would try do it manually, any workflow to avoid problems?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Create or Duplicate Hubs using the API.

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 02:46:37 GMT

The biggest thing to me is try not to lose any work from Revit cloud work-shared models. So, Publish, publish and publish. Some people does not even trust that and they open the actual model from Revit and then "save as". If there are links bw models, when you download the zip file, trust the zip file only to get the model in the name of the .zip. Do not grab the other files thinking you are going to save time. The other files could be on a different version of the model(True on BIM 360 Teams not 100% sure on BIM 360 Doc Management). Make sure to communicate pencils down during migration period if users are going to be back working on the new hub.

As a data point, 3 people migrated about 250 projects in 3 weeks working long nights sometimes in a hybrid workflow, automated and manual. A lot of the time is spent coordinating with users on when the project is going to be down. About 15 Revit models per project. We did not bother to do the cloud collaboration process for completed projects, only active.