What Autodesk platform to use for creating an Asp.net website to generate Drawings?

Question

I need to implement for a customer an Asp.net website in which he will enter the dimensions and onclick of a button a drawing will be generated. Its my first Autodesk project so just need some info regarding what to search on google. After researching for a while I came to know about Autodesk 360 and BIM. Am I correct or do I need some other development platform. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Be wary of the licensing here. being on asp.net it mean for them that their library will be available to all. this license is very very expensive. You are basically giving the opportunity to create CAD to everyone on the planet.

My solution i had to go with is buy 1 licence +/- 3000$ and installed it on a server then you create an app locally on the server that will pool from a database the requests and pipe them so you only have a single license at a time and them use the _saveas command and save it locally. then once the file has been created by autocad locally THAT file is totally legal to send around without licensing issue.

So you page can just push in database the data, attach a callback to let the user do what he wants. once the process is finish have it trigger the callback and the client will go get the file and download locally.

Answer 2

I would suggest you to take a look at the AutoCAD I/O web service. As it says on https://developer.autodesk.com/api/autocadio/, it allows developers to run AutoCAD scripts remotely and enable them to process DWG files at cloud scale. You can create an AutoCAD script or use one of our sample scripts, then point the AutoCAD I/O web service to the DWG files and finally run your script on the DWG files. AutoCAD I/O loads the DWG files, then run the script on each file. Upon completion, AutoCAD I/O saves the output to your specified location. AutoCAD I/O, as represented in the graphic, is storage agnostic—input and output files are not stored in AutoCAD I/O. Based on your choice of web storage; AutoCAD I/O is able to connect to it over HTTP.

You can find detailed information as well as code samples on https://developer.autodesk.com/api/autocadio/#

Answer 3

It may be a old post...

But Autodesk released the AutoCAD I/O web API. This allow you to invoke a running AutoCAD on the cloud to create drawing or batch processing .DWG files. Then download the results.

There is also a Viewer API to view these drawings. No installation required.

See keys and documentation at http://developer.autodesk.com