Field Data Extraction 101: Working with Filters

In my last blog post I talked about Driving an RFI workflow through BIM 360 Field. This generated some discussion around data extraction and one of the readers asked about how to make it more efficient when there are large number of data points. This gave the idea of starting a series of posts focusing on Field Data Extraction. So in this blog post, I decided to write about the Filters in BIM 360 Field - A very powerful and simple feature to help manage your data, sort, filter and extract.

Filters in BIM 360 Field 

Filters created by a Project Administrator allow you to display a subset of data in the project based on search values entered. Filters are created in BIM 360 Field web. Once the filter is created, it can be used as a way of limiting the amount of data returned in the view. Filters also allow you to limit the amount of data downloaded to the iPad for use in the field.

Create a Filter:

1. From the Project home page, select either  Issues,  Equipment,  Checklists, or  Tasks. 

2. The currently selected filter appears on the left. 

3. Under Filters at the bottom, select an option from the (+) Add drop-down menu: -
• From Blank. Create a filter with new settings. 
• From [current filter]. Create a filter that duplicates settings of the current one. 
4. Name the filter, specify roles, and click Save. 
5. Specify search values for Category, ID, Status, and so on, as needed, to view filtered results. 

Control Access to Issues Filters

1. Click  Issues. 
2. From the Filter drop-down menu, select a filter. 
3. Next to Filters on the bottom left, click Edit. 
4. Select roles allowed to view that filter and click Save.

Sample Field Issues Filters

Each of these filters allows users to display only the subset of data in the field Issues module. The same is true for Equipments, Checklists, Tasks, etc. Now let us look at how to access these filters through API for data extraction.

How to use Filters for Data Extraction: There are two major API endpoints for accessing the Filters in Field.

1. Admin API to Access all types of Filters in the System /fieldapi/admin/v1/filters

Description:

Retrieve the set of existing Filters for the project. If a category is specified, such as Issue, only those filters will be returned.

Parameters:

• ticket : string - The ticket obtained from the login call.
• project_id : string - Identifier of project in question.
• category : string - (optional) containing object (Issue, Equipment, Checklist, Task)

2. Issues API to Retrieve only Issue Filters /api/issue_filters

Description: Returns a list of issue filters for the authenticated user. 

Parameters:

• ticket : string - The ticket obtained from the login call.
• project_id : string - The ID of the project to perform this action against. 

Here is a Sample JSON response for the issue_filters API endpoint. The issue_filter_id from the response can be specified in retrieving only the required set of issues as described in the RFI Post. (Same can be applied for Equipments, etc.).

To illustrate this example, I added a small example in C#. Here you can see a user authenticated successfully retrieving the List of Issue filters for a project and loading them into a Drop Down list. Further, a specific filter can be selected and the corresponding issues retrieved into an external table. The Sample code is attached below. The Source Code for this application can be dowloaded from below Github Link.

Sample .NET code for retrieving Issue Filters

This concludes the first part of our Field Data Extraction 101. Keep watching this space for more! 

- Manu

Source Code on Github

 

Related articles

Driving a Request for Information (RFI) workflow through BIM 360 Field

Autodesk A360 Collaboration for Revit