Porting BIMServer to IFC 4.3_RC

[dkurillo]

Does somebody plan to port BimServer to the latest version of IFC standard? Is it difficult, are there any pitfalls?

[hlg]

We are planning to add IFC4.3 with the final version and official release.

[epeter-]

what schedule will you follow for that? Am 27.01.2022 um 10:08 schrieb hlg:

…

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[muren400]

Hi, are there any news regarding support for IFC4.3?

[muren400]

If I wanted to add support for IFC4X3 or some other IFC Schema myself, what steps would I go through to accomplish that? Is there some documentation regarding that topic?

[hlg]

I still have not found the time to review and reproduce the schema update process and thus cannot give instructions from the top of my head. I would go as follows: First compile issues and commits where the schema has been changed previously, e.g. to IFC4 ADD2 TC1 or IFC4 in general, or the process has been discussed (partly). Check the files that have changed and read related code, e.g. CodeMigrator.java.

Basically, I think we need to 1. generate ecore from the new Express files, 2. derive the genmodel from the ecore, 3. generate derived classes, 4. cater for database migrations, 5. adjust any schema specific code. The latter might be easier after #1158, but this would be a larger endeavour.

[PavelWhiteTiger]

Do we need models.ecore or IFC4X3_ADD2.ecore ?
And how i can get models.ecore ?

[hlg]

I think models.ecore is just a collection of the various packages. For example, the IFC2x3 package in models.ecore should be identical to the one in ifc2x3tc1.ecore. I have not done a diff, maybe you can verify. The difference between IFC packages and other packages (store, log, geometry) is just that the EMF models (.ecore) for IFC packages are derived from EXPRESS models (.exp) and the other packages are directly maintained as EMF models, for example using Eclipse tooling for modelling. Then, the models are in some regards treated the same, e.g. for database storage.

I forgot that with a new schema, we also need to touch many plugins, most notably IfcPlugins with serializers and deserializers. There are also different predefined queries for each schema. Basically, I would search the whole code base for occurrences of the existing IFC schema names in code or filenames. Then walk through the findings and for each occurrence understand why schemas are treated differently and how to fit in the new schema.

[monrus]

Hi, we prepared support of ifc4x3. We would like to do PR and publish a new version

[hlg]

Great, I saw your PR in opensourceBIM/BuildingSMARTLibrary as well as the work in the monrus/IfcPlugins fork with no PR yet. Other than those two and this repository, I think there are no other affected opensourceBIM repositories, are they?

For BIMserver itself I did not find your fork yet. You are welcome to go ahead and submit a PR. As this will be a bit larger of a change and more involved, review and testing will take a bit longer though. I would like to do a release before merging the PR, with the changes currently in master, and then after the merge. In the meantime, others could also build, test and use the snapshot from your fork.

Would you also share documentation of the steps in the procedure, such that we can put that in the Wiki and easily reproduce this in the future for IFC4X4?

[monrus]

We prepared changes on the BimServer repository but haven't published them on GitHub yet (use our own private repositories). Currently, we work with the version that supports ifc4x3 and it looks good for our use cases via the java client. The main problem with publishing it to GitHub is that we do other changes that need to be separated. I am going to do it next week.

I will prepare documentation with steps (your comments on #1306 were very helpful) and describe some cases which, I think, still contain problems.