COBie.Contact information from Revit into Solibri?

[alexxxx223]

Is it possible to export the contact information straight from the COBie contact setup using the BIM interoperability tool in to your IFC and then bring that into Solibri tp populate when creating your COBie sheets. The Contact information seems to export to some unfindable place?

I know there’s ifc parameters that can be created to get around the issue but I wondered if it’s possible without needing the extra steps?

Can I put something in my user defined property sets that will put that cobie information somewhere accessible?

[Jerome White]

Hi, i am also having this problem; either this COBie Contact information isn’t being exported by BIM Interoperability Tools from Revit to the IFC or Solibri isn’t able to find it in the IFC.

My understanding is that BIM Interoperability Tools writes the Contact data to its extensible storage, so there are no ‘COBie.Contact.xyz’ parameters to interrogate (without creating them as a workaround). Can someone please point out how to find this data in the IFC?

At the moment the Solibri COBie Extension is finding values for e.g. ‘Company’ but not ‘Email’, ‘Category’ etc. It’s also finding a value for ‘GivenName’ which hasn’t been populated in Revit.

@Ken-Good, thanks for your excellent webinar on the COBie extension for Solibri, any tips here?

Thanks!

[simon.gilbert]

You might be aware that you can create the contact information in the Interoperability toolkit and then assign this to the objects CreatedBY fields.

You can also export this contact information to and XML file i.e. Export contacts - if you do this with the FileName_COBieContact.xml then you can use this at the time of the IFC export to append this contact information to the IFC File. You also need to pick the predefined 2x3 COBie 2.4 Design Deliverable Setup Settings from the exporter list.

Now you might be jumping with joy here when you look at the IFC flle and see this data apparently in the file. But IFC is a relational hierarchy and as such if you check any object that is exported the Author will be the one in the header i.e. on the exporter you can put in Author emial, company etc. It’s this it uses to link to the objects on export not the field that is created as part of the Interoperability toolkit (CreatedBY). As such they are not connected to any part of the model and therefore Solibri does not import them.

I suppose the only way to do this at the moment would be to relink any object to the right IFCAUTHOR using the CreatedBY related data to these objects but this may be a rather large job and unless you know what you are doing prone to errors.

Really this needs to be logged with Autodesk as there is little point being able to create this data in the IFC file if its not linked to anything.

Have a look at the following article from Evolve Consultancy where they describe the process. We have since found that on carrying out development work for the contact sheet that the elements are never connected to these COBie Contacts created in the Interoperability kit.
https://evolve-consultancy.com/revit-ifc-export-3-working-with-the-cobie-extension/

[Jerome White]

Hi @simon-gilbert , thanks for this explanation and link, it’s really helpful.