Power web-based SaaS platform with Revit capabilities

[engineeringY8BSP]

Hi all,

I am interested in powering our app, a web-based SaaS platform, with Revit capabilities (for instance, the creation of dxf view from a 3D model).

Such operation is easy to automatize within the Revit GUI (using Dynamo for instance).

We would like now to call Revit, headlessly on our server.

I have not been able to find out whether:

* technically, the Revit API enables the external call of Revit functions, headlessly on a server? (@jeremytammik)

* contractually, a dedicated SDK subscription/AutoDesk developer program exists and must be considered?

Thank you for your support
BR

[ricaun · Accepted solution]

Take a look at Autodesk Forge - Desing Automation.

"Design Automation API for Revit is Revit’s engine running in the cloud as a Forge service. It provides access to the full Revit DB API without a Revit desktop install, so that you can build cloud-native apps and services that create, extract, and modify Revit data."

[engineeringY8BSP]

Indeed, it seems to be exactly the kind of solution I was looking for!
Thank you very much!

[Kennan.Chen]

You cannot do that all by yourself legally rather than technically.

Autodesk has the agreement to not allow use of Autodesk product in server environment.

If you do want to make external calls to Revit, you may also need some reverse engineering to Autodesk dlls, which is also illegal.

Sounds like Autodesk Forge is a perfect option for your requirements

In case you want to save that money or your BIM data is sensible to be uploaded to third-party cloud providers, you may do it like this:

Start a server in Revit to accept incoming calls and output the result elsewhere to be consumed by your web app.

And you may run Revit within the company on some physical machines or a cluster(we use retired machines to do this job) with desktop version operating system installed. The machines accept calls from your cloud server and output result to your cloud service. If your company is a software service provider, you may ask the customers to buy Revit and deploy machines in their companies.

I think it sounds legal enough.

[ankofl]

Oh, my God!

Dear @engineeringY8BSP ! Believe me verbatim: if you need to perform any operations with the model, Revit API is the worst solution possible! Moreover, attempt to use it as a third-party program specifically for this purpose! The Revit engine and its Revit API do not allow you to work correctly even with your own files (.rvt), it's scary to imagine what will happen if you try to use its engine for third-party files, even in a suitable format.

P.S. The Revit API still lacks any support for such a basic geometric operation as surface intersections! God!
I have to upload Revit models to json format through my own parser, upload it to Unity, and use various transformations and a third-party 2D library to perform surface 3D-intersection! God!

God forbid you to use RevitAPI even for some basic geometry operations!