7 Dec 2021

BIM 360/ACC Relationships API

Relationships API is a shared service used in BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC). A relationship defines a link between items (Entity) that reside in different modules (Domain). In BIM 360 and ACC UI, you can typically see them as a reference: for example, an asset may have links to checklists, issues and document attachments, where an asset resides in Asset Management, while a checklist and an issue reside in Field Management, and an attachment in Document Management.

Relationship web service keeps track of the instance of relationships created among different domains. In Relationship Service, an item to link, such as a checklist and an asset, is called Entity. Entity is composed of three properties: domain, type and id. In case of checklist, domain is autodesk-bim360-checklist, and type is checklist. It could be checklist template. id is an id of checklist. An entity for an Asset is defined in similar manner. It's a simple and clean data structure. 

relationship definition

Relationship web service exposes a set of endpoints to Read. What’s powerful about this API is that this simple structure provides a way to save and search those relationships independent from the implementation detail of each component. 

Using this API, you can: 

  • Read, search, create and delete relationships or references. 
  • Synchronize relationships using optional synchronization token. 

Additional information about this that Relationships API are: 

  • The API is compatible with BIM 360 and ACC
  • It supports 3-legged token only
  • Important: not all modules make use of relationships API at this point. Older modules that existed before relationships API was introduced do not use this API. Assets makes use of this API extensively. You can use relationships:writable utility to check if you can use it to identify writable relationships.
  • Currently it is not possible to define custom relationships.  

You can find more information from the AU presentations which talk about this API:

Documentation

SDK 

Postman Collection

Related Article

Posted By

Mikako Harada

Mikako Harada

Mikako Harada works as an AEC technical lead and Americas manager for the Developer Technical Services (DevTech) team at Autodesk. She provides API (Application Programming Interface) technical support to the members of Autodesk Developer Network worldwide for AEC products. Prior to joining Autodesk, she worked as a researcher for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. While at ETH, she...

Xiaodong Liang

Xiaodong Liang has been with Autodesk since 2007, focusing on providing programming support, consulting, training and evangelism to external developers. He started his career China and now lives in Beijing, China. Xiaodong is currently a developer consultant in the team Developer Technical Services (DevTech), the worldwide team of API gurus providing technical services through the Autodesk Developer Network. He...