ifcpatch is a little CLI utility and library that lets you run a predetermined modification on an IFC file, known as a patch recipe. This is great for distributing little scripts that need to modify an IFC to users who don't know how to code or aren't interested in knowing the details.

Installation

ifcpatch is a simple Python module. No compilation or packaging is necessary. Just download the ifcpatch directory and add it to your Python site packages. Then, you can run it as a CLI like:

$ python -m ifcpatch

If you want something more Unix-like ...

$ alias ifcpatch='python -m ifcpatch'

Alternatively, you can package it as a distributable.

$ python make.py
$ ./dist/ifcpatch

Usage

Usage is like any other CLI app.

$ ifcpatch -h

usage: __main__.py [-h] -i INPUT [-o OUTPUT] -r RECIPE [-l LOG]
                   [-a ARGUMENTS [ARGUMENTS ...]]

Patches IFC files to fix badly formatted data

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INPUT, --input INPUT
                        The IFC file to patch
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        The output file to save the patched IFC
  -r RECIPE, --recipe RECIPE
                        Name of the recipe to use when patching
  -l LOG, --log LOG     Specify a log file
  -a ARGUMENTS [ARGUMENTS ...], --arguments ARGUMENTS [ARGUMENTS ...]
                        Specify custom arguments to the patch recipe

Exactly how it is run depends on the recipe. A recipe may require zero or more arguments which are specific to the recipe. Here's an example which runs the ExtractElements recipe, which, as the same suggests, extracts out elements. This recipe expects one argument, which uses the IFC Query syntax. In this example, we'll extract out all IfcWall elements.

$ ifcpatch -i input.ifc -o output.ifc -r ExtractElements -a ".IfcWall"

You can also use it as a library.

import ifcpatch


ifcpatch.execute({
    "input": "input.ifc",
    "output": "output.ifc",
    "recipe": "ExtractElements",
    "log": "ifcpatch.log",
    "arguments": [".IfcWall"],
})