Interop: COBie, IDS, BCF

IFC carries the model; three sibling formats carry the workflows around it.

COBie 2.4 (handover data)

deriveCobieModel(model, meta) (alias exportCobie) extracts the facility-management view: contacts, facility, floors, spaces, zones, types, components, systems, and attributes, straight from the model's spatial structure and psets.

import { deriveCobieModel, serializeCobieToCsv, serializeCobieToJson } from 'brepjs-bim';

const cobie = deriveCobieModel(model, {
  contact: { email: 'jane@example.com', givenName: 'Jane', familyName: 'Doe' },
});
const csv = serializeCobieToCsv(cobie); // one CSV per sheet
const json = serializeCobieToJson(cobie);

IDS 1.0 (requirement checking)

The Information Delivery Specification is buildingSMART's machine-readable requirements format ("every external wall must carry a FireRating"). parseIdsXml reads and audits an IDS document the way the official IDS Audit tool does (entity names validated against the IFC schemas, attribute names against the applicable entities, value constraints against the declared data types — an invalid document is rejected, never silently mis-checked). checkIdsData (alias checkIds) then evaluates every specification against IFC file bytes directly, covering every entity instance in the file.

import { parseIdsXml, checkIds } from 'brepjs-bim';

const ids = parseIdsXml(idsXml);
if (ids.ok) {
  const report = await checkIds(ifcBytes, ids.value);
  if (report.ok) {
    // report.value.results: per-spec outcomes with counts and issues
  }
}

The checker passes the complete official buildingSMART IDS conformance suite (334 of 334 test cases across entity, attribute, property, classification, material, partOf, restriction, and tolerance facets, including the floating-point tolerance contract, unit conversion to SI, the IFC2X3 type-mapping table, and per-facet cardinality). Reproduce with scripts/idsConformance.ts against a clone of buildingSMART/IDS.

BCF 3.0 (issue exchange)

The BIM Collaboration Format moves issues (topics, comments, viewpoints, component selections) between tools without moving the model. parseBcfFiles reads an unzipped BCF container into typed data; serializeBcfFiles writes one. Zip packaging is deliberately left to the caller, so the library stays dependency-free.

import { parseBcfFiles, serializeBcfFiles } from 'brepjs-bim';

const container = parseBcfFiles(files); // Record<path, bytes>
if (container.ok) {
  const roundTripped = serializeBcfFiles(container.value);
}

Topics reference model elements by GlobalId, which is where stable identity pays off again: a families-projected model keeps GlobalIds stable across rebuilds, so BCF issues filed against one export still point at the right elements in the next.