You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Yes, it seems indeed completely neglected. In IFC we still use it as an alternative serialization to SPF. And to be fair it makes some sense. We have some "lighter" use cases such as sheets of manufacturing data that are actually small tree structures of data, so not full fledged geometric models. These data publishers aren't really invested in BIM, they just want a vendor neutral way to publish their data. So XML with much more generic implementation support makes sense. In practice though, I don't think it's actually in use. There's several ifc-xml dialects and some issues with invalid data.
p28 is also quite complex. There are like 2 dozens of configuration options that quite dramatically alter the structure of the models. So the resulting XSD can actually be tailored to be readable and elegant, but the machinery to derive it from express is quite complex (or at least when I tried to read it in the standard text, maybe in code it's actually more straightforward).
What do you think? Would it make sense to try and do this as part of stepcode? If we're really going to see no usage of it at all, I might al well do it with my own quick and dirty python parser, but if there's a chance of more widespread use and collaborative development then it's something I should consider.
@cshorler I have since then implemented my own quick and dirty conversion logic [0], I don't think it would generalize immediately to other schemas, it's simply based on the old IFC4 EXP and XSD that we had (which might well be non-compliant to begin with). We don't really have people in the community with enough knowledge and time to get this to a higher level of confidence. Now that there is something, it's also really not a priority for us. Please ping me on this thread if there's work towards this and I'll see if I can contribute.
Activity
brlcad commentedon Mar 21, 2022
Negative. I've actually never even encountered STEP-XML and thought it was a somewhat dead/niche spec. What uses it?
aothms commentedon Mar 21, 2022
Yes, it seems indeed completely neglected. In IFC we still use it as an alternative serialization to SPF. And to be fair it makes some sense. We have some "lighter" use cases such as sheets of manufacturing data that are actually small tree structures of data, so not full fledged geometric models. These data publishers aren't really invested in BIM, they just want a vendor neutral way to publish their data. So XML with much more generic implementation support makes sense. In practice though, I don't think it's actually in use. There's several ifc-xml dialects and some issues with invalid data.
p28 is also quite complex. There are like 2 dozens of configuration options that quite dramatically alter the structure of the models. So the resulting XSD can actually be tailored to be readable and elegant, but the machinery to derive it from express is quite complex (or at least when I tried to read it in the standard text, maybe in code it's actually more straightforward).
What do you think? Would it make sense to try and do this as part of stepcode? If we're really going to see no usage of it at all, I might al well do it with my own quick and dirty python parser, but if there's a chance of more widespread use and collaborative development then it's something I should consider.
cshorler commentedon Sep 26, 2022
The Rec Practice for Product Structure exchange uses it - so, now I have some level of interest in supporting this.
cshorler commentedon Sep 26, 2022
I think also the rec prac for kinematics exchange as well
aothms commentedon Sep 27, 2022
@cshorler I have since then implemented my own quick and dirty conversion logic [0], I don't think it would generalize immediately to other schemas, it's simply based on the old IFC4 EXP and XSD that we had (which might well be non-compliant to begin with). We don't really have people in the community with enough knowledge and time to get this to a higher level of confidence. Now that there is something, it's also really not a priority for us. Please ping me on this thread if there's work towards this and I'll see if I can contribute.
[0] https://github.com/buildingSMART/IFC4.3.x-development/blob/master/code/express_to_xsd.py
cshorler commentedon Sep 28, 2022
@aothms will do
hansWurst-creator commentedon Mar 22, 2023
Is this trying to solve the same Problem you are talking about here?
It might not be generalized for your use case.
https://github.com/mtconnect/iso_133399