BIM Semantic Viewer

BIM Semantic Viewer presents the elements of IFC files and their semantics in several differently structured tree views. In addition to the predefined views, user-defined tree views can also be created. The values of selected attributes can be displayed in table columns. A panel on the side shows all the details of the selected element. Other panels summarize all property sets or quantity sets and the values used in them. It is also possible to validate the data using rules defined in IDS files, and an editor for IDS files is also provided.

BIM Semantic Viewer is Open Source under GPL 2. It has been tested on Windows and Linux.

This program has been developed as project in the module "Geoprojektarbeit" at Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT)

Installation

The provided packages contain executables that can be started with a double click without any further installation.

The following sections are about running the source code.

Python

Python must be installed on the system to run the source code. The required package IfcOpenShell is compatible with Python 3.9 to 3.12.

Setup venv

Note: some requirements are not in conda, it is better to use a Python venv and to install requirements with pip

Create virtual environment in the project root folder

python -m venv venv

Activate the venv

Linux:

source venv/bin/activate

Windows Powershell:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope Process
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

Install requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Translation

(Commands in the root directory of the project with venv enabled)

Update translations:

pyside6-lupdate bimsemantic/ui/*.py -ts bimsemantic/i18n/bimsemantic_de.ts

Edit the translations in QtLinguist

pyside6-linguist bimsemantic/i18n/bimsemantic_de.ts

and then release translation with:

pyside6-lrelease bimsemantic/i18n/bimsemantic_de.ts

Resources

Icons have to be added to resources.qrc. This file is compiled with:

pyside6-rcc resources.qrc -o resources.py

Packaging with PyInstaller

This section explains how to create a package with PyInstaller.

With activated venv:

pip install PyInstaller

PyInstaller uses a spec file for configuration. To create a spec file for a project, run the following commands with activated venv. Note: use one of the provided spec files instead!

cd bimsemanticviewer
pyinstaller app.py

The spec file has to be edited: Hidden imports and required files such as the IFC rules and ids.xsd have to be packaged as well. The source code contains the edited files for windows (app.spec.windows) and Linux (app.spec.linux).

Now run

pyinstaller app.spec

And the exe will be in the dist folder

In case of any problems, try:

pip3 install --upgrade PyInstaller pyinstaller-hooks-contrib

Note to self: git pull with github cli: gh repo sync