IFC SDK Overview

ODA IFC SDK implements functionality for working with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) open data format, which is widely used in the building information modeling and facility management industries.

ODA IFC SDK supports the idea of an abstract model containing a common data schema that determines storage and processing conditions for any suitable information about construction or facility assets. This provides:

Storage of useful and actual information.
Easy data exchange between different software.

IFC SDK public API contains a set of schema-dependent C++ classes automatically generated from files of supported IFC Express Schema formats. These classes support specifications of an IFC model's objects (IFC2x3 and IFC4 versions) with the Express Schema descriptive language.

Another part of the IFC SDK API provides the following functionality:

Data access features (implementation of the Data Access Standard Interface, DAI):
- A set of standard classes that incorporate working with IFC 2x3 and IFC 2x4 entity types including the ability to access all property data.
- Iterators for sequential access to the model's objects.
- Creating new entities and setting their attributes for the active schema.
A new module for working with IFC geometry, including Facet and B-Rep modelers.
Visualization features:
- IFC model visualization on all desktop and mobile platforms supported by ODA (using ODA Visualize SDK).
- Full support of navigation, view modes, selection and property queries.
- Interference detection in IFC models.
- Level of detail (LOD) support provides the best performance.
- Detailed examination of an IFC model's hidden parts with real-time cutting planes.
- Fast visualization via the web (using ODA Web SDK in any browser that supports WebGL technology).
Exchange features:
- Converting geometry of a .ifc file to a .dwg drawing database and vice versa.
Publishing features:
- Publishing .ifc file content to a standard 2D PDF document (using ODA Publish SDK).
- Publishing .ifc file content to an interactive, feature-rich 3D PDF document (using ODA Publish SDK).

The module structure of IFC SDK is described in the IFC SDK Modules topic.

IFC SDK depends on Kernel SDK. To use IFC SDK for creating custom applications, you need to download and unpack the Kernel SDK archive. All library dependencies of IFC SDK are represented in the Library Dependencies of IFC SDK topic.

See Also