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The main goal of my project is to read Autocad(DWG) drawings from my local server to output them in a web browser (Chrome).

I managed to do it with the View and Data API in JAVA from Autocad with buckets, Key, etc. but when it comes to read offline files with this sample code from https://github.com/Developer-Autodesk/view-and-data-offline-sample, the DWG format did not work.

Do you have suggestion or have a clue to use the offline API with DWG files?

Kevin Therrien
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    It should work, but you need the whole JSON bubbles on your server. Check the http://extract.autodesk.io for a NodeJS sample (it creates the code for a local viewing service and works offline). – Augusto Goncalves Mar 16 '16 at 18:49
  • Thank you for your answer, I will give it a try! – Kevin Therrien Mar 16 '16 at 18:54
  • I think I will continue to use the View and Data API in JAVA. I will upload all my drawings into my bucket and read it from there. Does the bucket is secure? Am I able to see the content of a bucket in A360? Thank you – Kevin Therrien Mar 16 '16 at 19:25
  • You can only read the bucket with your developer key and secret, so yes, is secure – Augusto Goncalves Mar 16 '16 at 19:29

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The Autodesk View & Data API (developer.autodesk.com) allows you to display a DWG on your website using a zero-client (WebGL) viewer. You need to upload the DWG to the Autodesk server, translate it, and either then download the translation to store on your local server (as demonstrated on extract.autodesk.io) or keep it on the Autodesk server. You might consider downloading it to be advantageous because then you don't need to implement the OAuth code on your server.

Buckets on the Autodesk server can only be accessed using the accesstoken created from your API keys, so it is secure in that only someone with your accesstoken and who knows the URN can access your translated file. However, for the viewer on your client-page to access the file, you need to provide it with your accesstoken. This does mean that someone could separately access your translated file by grabbing the accesstoken and URN from your webpage. But if you're serving up the model on a public page, then you presumably don't care about that.

There is a 'list' API available, but this is white-listed (available on request), so getting your accesstoken and urn for one file doesn't automatically give access to your other files - unless someone can guess the other filenames (or iterate to find them).

If you use a non-permanent bucket, then your original (untranslated file) becomes unavailable when the bucket expires, or you can explicitly delete the untranslated file (using the delete API).

Files translated via the View & Data API are not accessible via A360. They are stored in a separate area. (But I wouldn't be at all surprised if an A360 file access API became available in the near future :-).

Finally, unless you want to interact with the displayed file via the viewer's JavaScript API, you may prefer just to upload your files to A360, share the translated model, and then iframe embed them in your webpage.

Stephen Preston
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  • I have the same issue and i'm looking if there is any other solution to view DWG files in my web app without uploading them to the servers (any SDK, API .. ) ! – Salah ED Apr 17 '23 at 11:43