How to represent IFC models on Android?

Question

I have to represent IFC files on an Android application. First I have to get them from a server (I will use BIM Server), and then extract the geometry out of the IFC file, and try to display them. The parsing is my first concern at this point. Is there any JAVA library that mounts on the BIM server to directly give us the .obj data so we can show them on Android? Or maybe it is better to parse IFC files at the client side, and then display it? Sorry, there is no robust documentation on it.

I found there are two tools for it: OpenIFCTools, and IFCOpenShell which provides a plugin. I'm not sure which one to use, and which one gives a better JAVA API to go for.

Answer 1

You can not directly visualize them on Android as it is not supported (based on what I know so far). You may need to parse them somehow on the client side, or use some tools to parse them on server, then send the corresponding .obj files (such as IFCOpenShell's IFCOBJ conversion tool)