How to create plugins for Onshape?

Ilya

Thank you for Onshape! This program is great and very impressing. It is hard to imagine that so small team in so short time can implement so cool system.

Could you tell me, where I can read about possibility of implementation of my own plugins for Onshape? (usually I create many small tools for automatization of simple operations; but now it is not clear, how to do it in Onshape). I expect it is important question for many beta-testers, but I can't find any information about it on this forum.

Thank you.

stephen_lewin_berlin

We haven't published our API yet, but it is coming...  I'm interested in what kind of plugins you have in mind.  Feel free to answer here, or message me privately if you prefer.

Steve
Onshape Partner & API Lead

stephen_lewin_berlin

The first release of our API will be more focused on enabling partners to deliver applications that work with or integrate into Onshape through mechanisms such as REST calls. Supporting user-defined plugins is definitely of interest as well, but we aren't prepared to discuss how that will be done, and in fact, I expect that there will be more than one way to create plugins. Yes, we will support ways to share such plug-ins eventually.

stephen_lewin_berlin

We haven't published our API yet, but it is coming...  I'm interested in what kind of plugins you have in mind.  Feel free to answer here, or message me privately if you prefer.

Steve
Onshape Partner & API Lead

mcconnell113

@Stephen Lewin-Berlin 
 Is there any date or timeframe set for an API public release?

stephen_lewin_berlin

No, we haven't announced any dates for public release of the API.  In general, you've probably noticed that we are reluctant to pre-announce dates. With updates every few weeks, we aren't locked into annual release cycles - so we're woking on many enhancements at once, and constantly evaluating what's baked enough to push out for public consumption. 

Ilya

We haven't published our API yet, but it is coming...

Ok, thank you, I'll wait for news about it.

I'm interested in what kind of plugins you have in mind.

Typical example for me:
- I have a rough tesselation of surface (few hungreds of triangles),
- I need to replace each triangle (with vertices v1, v2, v3) of special type by three new triangles.
- I.e. I need to calculate coordinates of new vertex v4, delete existent triangle, and add three new triangles: (v1, v2, v4), (v2, v3, v4), (v3, v1, v4),
- also I need to check special conditions of replaced triangle (i.e. do I need to replace it or can I keep it).

Now I can do such things with the most of off-line CADs. I suspect that many of CAD users sometimes need such special simple operations. So I was very surprised, that there are no many questions about plugins for Onshape on this forum.

traveler_hauptman

@Ilya I'm really curious what you are doing that this would be useful? Are you willing to share more details? At first glance it does not sound like something you would use something like Onshape (or Solidworks, etc) for.

Ilya

Traveler_Hauptman said:

@Ilya I'm really curious what you are doing that this would be useful? Are you willing to share more details? At first glance it does not sound like something you would use something like Onshape (or Solidworks, etc) for.

Thank you for your answer. You are right: I've removed the most of details to make description short and simple. It was just example to demonstrate, that sometimes I need to do something simple with faces (I have many other examples, but I don't want to spend your time on analysis of similar things). May be it is very specific modification of elements of model... But I don't understand, why Onshape is not good system for it.

I only need to know, how do you plan to allow users to create plugins. Will it be on Javascript (it seems logical for web)? Will it be executible in browser or in cloud? Will it be possible to share my plugin for other Onshape users (like I can share any model)?

stephen_lewin_berlin

The first release of our API will be more focused on enabling partners to deliver applications that work with or integrate into Onshape through mechanisms such as REST calls. Supporting user-defined plugins is definitely of interest as well, but we aren't prepared to discuss how that will be done, and in fact, I expect that there will be more than one way to create plugins. Yes, we will support ways to share such plug-ins eventually.

matthieu_2

I would be also interested by the ability to create plugin.

For our applications, it could be: 
- something such as high-level design tool following a standard pattern (e.g. automatically generate design to assemble 2 parts).
- generate URDF from a robot assembly,

guido_hilst

Hi Stephan,

A useful example of a plugin would be constructing frames with predefined profile-sketches. (parametric defined sketches)

For example round, square or rectangular predefined profiles(sketches) that are (automatically)extruded to tube-shapes.
In this way we could construct a tube-frame structure very easy, thus without making for each tube a profile sketch and extrude the sketches to create a frame.

Then we could make special joint types(predefined) to connect the tube ends.
Maybe some kind of feature detection mechanism to detect certain features(in this case if solid is a tube shape)

Best regards,

Guido