bbrangeo / web-ifc

IFC parsing and geometry generation in WASM!

web-ifc

Warning: this is pre-alpha software, an experimental backend for IFC.js

Web ifc is a WASM-based ifc parser & geometry generator. This repository contains the c++/typescript source code.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/web-ifc

Example viewer application using ThreeJS

Installing the library as an npm dependency

npm install web-ifc

Using the library

See examples for different ways to use web-ifc.

For a short intro, this is how to use the library from javascript:

const WebIFC = require("web-ifc/web-ifc-api.js");

// initialize the API
const ifcApi = new WebIFC.IfcAPI();

// initialize the library
await ifcApi.Init();

// open a model from data
let modelID = ifcApi.OpenModel(/* placeholder filename */, /* IFC data as a string or UInt8Array */);

// the model is now loaded! use modelID to fetch geometry

// close the model, all memory is freed
ifcApi.CloseModel(modelID);

Building the library

Setting up emscripten

The WASM library is built through emscripten, please see the emscripten installation guide for information on how to set up emscripten. Afterwards both setup-env and em++ need to be in your path.

WASM library

Run npm install to install all dependencies.

Run npm run init-repo to download both dependencies of the project (glm and earcut.hpp) to the correct location. This only needs to happen once.

Run npm run setup-env whenever you open a new terminal, this will set up the required emscripten environment variables for you to compile code.

Run npm run build-release to build a release version of the wasm binary and the accompanying web-ifc api. It will be placed in ./dist.

Run npm run dev to launch a development server with a basic ifc file viewer.

Stand alone C++ executable

Compiling the library to a standalone executable requires use of CMAKE. For visual studio code, the easiest way is by installing cmake-tools.

Using the library as a C++ dependency

The library is header only, the files in web-ifc-cpp can be trivially included in any project. The library depends on GLM and earcut.