Enterprises with a development team or individual programmers can leverage Alibre Design's extensive application programming interface to create light or deep integrations with their own applications to solve business-critical engineering challenges.
The API can be used to achieve a wide variety of functionality:
Fully Integrated Apps
Build your app's functionality onto Alibre's design platform. Achieve things like fully integrated FEA, CAM, or motion simulation.
Automation
Automate design creation by ingesting design criteria from your application into Alibre Design. Achieve things like a kitchen builder application.
Interoperability
Automate the transfer of 3D content to your application. Create bi-directional associativity. Achieve things like bringing a design into your CAM application, and updating your CAM application when the design changes.
Design Intent Transfer
Migrate models and design intent such as 3D constraints into your application. Achieve things like automatic mapping of motion relationships to your app's representation.
Domain-specific
Create applications with deep domain-specific knowledge. Achieve things like a pipe routing or weldment generator.
Extensions
Extend Alibre Design's functionality to cater to your specific use case.
Languages
Alibre Design's API connects to applications using C++ or .NET (C# or VB.NET).
An example of a fully integrated add-on's user interface elements.
User Interface
Your addon can integrate into Alibre Design's core user interface. Create your own tab on the ribbon or create a menu list. You can also inject a user interface into a tab on the Design Explorer.
Or, show any dialog you choose outside of Alibre Design's Interface.
FEMdesigner's custom Ribbon UI.
Headless Mode
No UI is required. Run and control Alibre Design in headless mode where no interface is presented at all.
Run on a Server
Running Alibre Design headless on a server is especially interesting to power distributed design / analysis.
Object Picking
Leverage Alibre Design's picking tools to get inputs for your application. Allow the user to pick edges, faces, vertices, sketches, reference geometry, etc.
Canvas Drawing
Display objects or data on the Alibre Design canvas directly. Things like toolpaths, FEA results, text, curves, shapes, and solids can all be drawn alongside the model.
Save into Stream
Create a save stream into Alibre Design's files. Users can now save data relevant to your add-on alongside all other data related to a model. When they open it again, the data is available for your add-on's use.
Screenshots
Take screenshots of the canvas as needed. This can be especially useful to create the input for movie generation to show how a model's position or other characteristics change over time.
Position and View
Programmatically change the position or orientation of components in an assembly or modify the view location.
Create Geometry
Programmatically create sketches, parameters, features, constraints etc.
Much more...
Alibre Design's API is extensive and you can tie in to most features in the software. See the reference documentation near the top of this page for more information.
Questions & Partnerships
Our team can help your business team or developers to analyze the requirements of your desired integration, determine feasibility, and potentially add to the API if required. Contact us.
