This is a growing set of groovy tools to handle IFC data. GroovyIFC is currently based on the Open IFC Java Toolbox (see prerequisites). The tool set started out as dae2ifc.groovy, a skript to write IFC geometry from collada files.

The heart of the script - IfcBuilder - can be easily used to write arbitrary IFC entities programmatically from arbitrary input data - in a compact and concious fashion. Apart from writing, the combination of Groovy and OpenIfcTools is a very handy way for ad-hoc queries on IFC data. Another use case is quick and dirty programmatic manipulation of IFC files for research or prototyping purposes (see DeepSpatialHierarchy.groovy). A set of utility methods is bundled in IfcModelHelper.

People asked for it, so I decided to put it out in the wild. Hope it'll gonna be useful to anybody. Comes with no warranty.

Prerequisites

• Groovy
• IFC Tools Project: the current development version of GroovyIfc is based on their Java Toolbox 2.0.1

How to write IFC

This example shows how dae2ifc.groovy builds its IFC model

def ifcBuilder = new IfcBuilder()
ifcBuilder.proxy {
  globalId = globallyUniqueId('123456')
  representation = productDefinitionShape {
    representations = [
      shapeRepresentation {
        representationIdentifier = label('Body')
        representationType = label('Brep')
        items = [] as Set
      }
    ]  
  }
}
ifcBuilder.write("path/to/file", "file.ifc")

This results in "file.ifc" with the following lines in its data part:

#1= IFCSHAPEREPRESENTATION($,'Body','Brep',());
#2= IFCPRODUCTDEFINITIONSHAPE($,$,(#1));
#3= IFCPROXY('123456',$,$,$,$,$,#2,$,$);

How to read IFC

Just read in and use GPath. You could do something like this:

def model = new IfcModel()
model.readStepFile("file.ifc")
def products = model.ifcObjects.findAll{ it instanceof IfcProduct }
println products.representation.representations.representationType
// find all products without representations or with representations without items
products.findAll{prod ->
  ! prod.representation?.representations.any{it -> !it.items.isEmpty()}
}

Nice to read, isn't it?

How to improve

I'd love to see these improvements, but I'm afraid I won't find the time. Don't hesitate to fork the project.

dae2ifc.groovy:

• validate manifold Brep geometry
• optimize ifc file: write each point once only (currently multiple times - once for every polygon)

other use cases:

• sophisticated example for reading/querying IFC (e.g. representation counter)