If you go to PLM 360 Online Help, you may notice a new section at the bottom. The “REST API v2 Reference” has everything you need to get started developing client applications for PLM 360.
Since I’m an engineer, I’ll immediately dive in to the bad news…
The API is in tech preview mode. That means we are still stabilizing it. Support is limited, and breaking API changes may occur without warning. It’s perfect if you want to be an early adopter, but I highly discourage writing anything mission critical at this time. Please keep your apps limited to prototypes and easy-to-update utilities.
Once the API stabilizes, we will remove the tech preview restrictions and provide official support. I have no ETA for when this will happen since stability isn’t something I want to rush.
The next piece of bad news is that you need an Oxygen key to log in. Oxgyen is the service that let’s users log in with their Autodesk ID. You need to first request a key. Once you have your key, you have to write a fair amount of code to allow your app to log in to PLM. All these steps are outlined in the “Authentication” section of the online API help.
The good news is that one you are logged in, the rest of the PLM 360 API is pretty straightforward.
Lastly, there is a distinct lack of API libraries. Most of the burden is on the client developer to deal with the low level REST details. Again, this is because the API is for early adopters. There are some sample apps to help you, but they don’t contain full API coverage. If you want to do anything not shown in a sample app, you will have to write the proxy code yourself.
We will eventually have a set of libraries to hide the low level REST details, but I don’t have an ETA at this time. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that I like to write sample apps. So I’m very motivated to get these libraries in place.
If you have any questions or comments about the REST API, I suggest posting to the PLM 360 discussion group. Please put “REST API” in the title, so that I can easily find it.
Keep reading this blog for the latest PLM 360 API announcements, sample apps, articles, tips and tricks, etc. From here on out, this blog will be covering the APIs for both Vault and PLM 360.
Leave a Reply