STEP to XML

[Thomas Ne]

Hello everybody,

I'm working on a university project, where i'm supposed to convert STEP files into XML files.

Any ideas which part of stepCode to use for this purpose?

I have read the previous conversations related to this topic and I found the following:

- Some people said that STEP->XML conversion is not yet supported.

- And others started to experiment with the exppp part of stepCode. (However there was no follow up on their success)

Can you help me, and point me to the right direction?

Thank you very much!

Tom

[gkovacsds]

Hi Thomas,

as a developer who wrote an exporter for step I can say that STEP is a very specific purpose format, while XML is a general one, you can use it for whatever you want.

You could even just say that for every step line you create an xml tag containing the step text - which is just not reasonable of course, but then you have already converted step to xml! :-) You'll just need a parser to interpret it! ;)

So, first you'll have to define your xml structure (the meaning of its content), then work on how to grab the necessary data from step to fill your xml tags / attribs. Which can be a painful thing given the complexity/optional contents of step.

-Geri

[Steve Waterbury]

Hi Tom,

"STEP Files" are defined in ISO 10303-21 (a.k.a. STEP Part 21,
clear text encoding). There is an XML encoding defined in
ISO 10303-28 (STEP Part 28):
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=40646

I would strongly suggest that you *not* invent your own XML
encoding but use Part 28 because a lot of work was put
into developing it and it would be a shame to duplicate it
or create yet another XML encoding that may or may not be
compatible.

I believe the "JSDAI" product from LKSoft supports Part 28;
at least it had a working implementation of Part 28 some years
ago but I'm not sure if it is still supported:
http://www.jsdai.net/support/about-step/step-xml

Steve

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[Thomas Ne]

Hi Geri,

thank you very much for your help!

I actually managed to get a 3rd party STEP->XML converter running (https://github.com/steptools/stp2bom), but just as you highlighted: I'm just as stupid, as I have been before. You are right, first I probably need a decent STEP interpreter/parser to get an object model, and then I can decide what to export into the XML.

Can you recommend any good parsers? (Preferably C++/C#, but I'm also comfortable with other languages.)

Greetings from Budapest, ;-)

Tamas 

[Thomas Ne]

Hi Steve,

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Cheers,

Tom