Transcript
Autodesk i-drop® Technology
White Paper
The i-drop® Web Publishing Framework Publishing intelligent design content on the Internet Introduction Increasingly, design professionals around the world are turning to the Internet as their primary source of product information. Product manufacturers and content aggregators are responding with aggressive efforts to convert their sales, marketing and catalog information to the Web. This promises to revolutionize the “value chain” involved in designing, specifying and producing manufactured and constructed products. A major stumbling block in this evolving process is that, while there are recognized standards for displaying product information in a standard Web browser, there is no standard way to publish intelligent design data using standard Web pages. And even if there were a consistent way to publish design data on the Web, there is no broad suite of desktop design tools for consistently acquiring this published data. Autodesk is the global leader in desktop design solutions based on its AutoCAD technology platform, with millions of active users worldwide. It is far and away the leader in computeraided design applications with a pervasive presence on desktops around the world. Autodesk is also the only design solutions company in the world with a suite of tools that encompasses the full range of the design enterprise, including building design and construction; mapping, land planning and civil engineering and surveying; and mechanical design and manufacturing. Tens of millions of design professionals in 14 languages around the world are trained on Autodesk applications, and billions of documents have been produced with Autodesk software. Taken as a whole, the global community of Autodesk customers is the most powerful and well-qualified evaluators of design content that has ever been assembled. i-drop is Autodesk’s framework for publishing design objects within standard Web pages. Web pages that contain i-drop objects look and behave exactly like a standard Web page in a standard Web browser. But when these same Web pages are displayed in any of Autodesk’s new generation of Web-enabled desktop design tools, an i-drop object becomes an open gateway between the content provider’s server and the Autodesk user’s desktop. The Autodesk user can simply drag the i-drop object from the provider’s web page and drop it into his/her desktop application for evaluation or inclusion in the evolving specification. This promises to vastly accelerate the process by which manufacturers and content aggregators conduct business with those who are responsible for evaluating and specifying their products. This white paper introduces you to the mechanics of i-drop -what you can do with it and how it works- and points you to more detailed documentation on implementing i-drop in your web-based commerce solution.
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The i-drop® Web Publishing Framework
i-drop Basics To understand how i-drop enabled Web pages work, it is best to review how standard Web pages are built and displayed in browsers. HTML is used to compose web pages, and contains the complete description of how the browser should render the page and how the page should behave.
HTML is a standard description for presenting text & graphics for Web browsers for display
Web browsers receive .html commands and use them to create and display web graphics
By including references to i-drop objects in the HTML file, this example web page can be authored so that it looks exactly the same in a standard web browser. But it actually has much more data than a standard web browser can handle.
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The i-drop® Web Publishing Framework There are two basic types of additional data that can be embedded within an i-drop object: it’s “Presentation” and it’s “Data”. The Presentation component can be thought of as “what you see” in the Web browser, and the Data can be thought of as “what you get” in your Autodesk application when you drag and i-drop the object from the browser to the application. Any content provider can create a continuous data bridge from a Web server to the worldwide Autodesk customer base.
i-drop Implementation The i-drop framework is implemented through a combination of (1) an ActiveX control (IDROP.OCX) that works in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and (2) enhanced functionality on the part of a growing number of Autodesk applications, including AutoCAD® 2000i or 2002, and 3D Studio VIZ® R3. The i-drop control enhances Internet Explorer so special i-drop objects can be embedded in standard HTML pages for display and use within Internet Explorer. An i-drop object basically consists of two components: (1) The Presentation which is “what you see” when the object is displayed in the web browser, and (2) The Data which is “what you get” when the object is dragged and dropped from the web browser to the i-drop-enabled application.
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The i-drop® Web Publishing Framework The i-drop framework has been designed to give web designers the maximum flexibility in designing their web experience, both in terms of Presentation options available and types of Data that can be conveyed through the mechanism. Each of these options is introduced below. i-drop Presentation Options The simplest presentation option available is to present a static bitmap image in GIF, JPEG or other format supported by the browser. When designing i-drop objects in this way, the entire region of the bitmap will serve as a “handle” for dragging and dropping: i.e. the cursor will change to a distinctive i-drop cursor which is the user’s clue that an object represented by this bitmap image is available. If the user mouses-down within the handle region, the cursor changes to indicate that the object has been “grasped” and so it is ready to drag into the local application. The i-drop control also supports a number of enhanced web presentation options in that the i-drop control can host other well-behaved ActiveX controls. In this way, third-party runtime display programs such as Flash or 3D streaming and animation controls such as MetaCreation’s Metastream, Pulse Entertainment’s Pulse3D or Cyclore’s Cult3D can serve as a graphical front-end to an i-drop component on a web page. This allows a web designer the option, for example, to present a real-time 3D representation of a data packet that can be viewed and manipulated in real time on the web page in the browser, so that a user can evaluate the data before dragging it into his/her application. When hosting other ActiveX presentation controls in this way, the i-drop object will cede mouse control of the display region to that control. In other words, within this region the behavior of the mouse will be exactly as if the display were not hosted within the i-drop control. In this case, the web designer would define an area outside of the hosted presentation as the handle region. i-drop object
Handle Region that user “grabs” to initiate drag and drop operation display
Area of hosted display
Proper programming practice would call for consideration of what the Presentation of the idrop component would look like if the IDROP.OCX were not present. There is functionality defined with i-drop for presenting any static bitmap image whenever the i-drop control is not present. In this way, web sites are easy to develop that support standard display and functionality but enhanced functionality if i-drop is present on the local machine, as it would be in Autodesk i-drop-aware client applications.
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The i-drop® Web Publishing Framework i-drop Data Options The data that is acquired from dragging and dropping an i-drop component into an Autodesk i-drop application is normally contained in an XML file called a “package file”. This file can make reference to any number of files on the server that can be acquired and used by the Autodesk application in any number of ways. For example, a package file can be used to transmit multiple DWG files to an AutoCAD user, or it can be used to transmit both a 3D luminaire object and its associated materials and photometric information to a 3D Studio VIZ user. The package file can even present different files to different Autodesk applications, so that the same i-drop object might support different data sets to multiple applications. For More Information For technical documentation on how to implement the i-drop framework and how Autodesk applications use i-drop data, please visit the i-drop pages on the developer center at www.autodesk.com/developidrop.
Autodesk, Inc. 111 McInnis Parkway San Rafael, CA 94903 USA Autodesk, AutoCAD, i-drop and 3D Studio VIZ are registered trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. © Copyright 2003 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
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