Common Data Environments are the source of truth repositories for the majority of large-scale Infrastructure project data. This data needs to be appropriately shared between different people, teams and systems to enable collaboration and decision-making. However relying on manual processes to transfer data is extra work and introduces human error, resulting in teams having incomplete or, worse, out-of-date information.
The Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) integration allows you to connect your Common Data Environment to Sensat to automatically access files so they can be visualised together seamlessly with all your other project data. This allows you to maintain a single source of truth in Autodesk Docs (or BIM 360 Docs) and have confidence that content visualised in Sensat is always up-to-date, covers all disciplines, and retains its metadata.
Key features
Visualise geolocated data stored in your CDE seamlessly together.
Automated hourly sync to Sensat based on your approval workflow.
Eliminate the risk of data being out of date or missing entirely from Sensat.
How it works
An administrator first needs to enable the integration and configure which folders to sync from ACC to Sensat (see below).
Every hour changes made to files in ACC will sync to Sensat. This includes new files, revisions, changes to any file attributes, and deletions.
Once files have been synchronised to Sensat they can be visualised in the same way as manually uploaded files.
Set-up and Configuration
A BIM360 admin must enable the Sensat Integration through the BIM360 admin panel.
Visit https://admin.b360.eu.autodesk.com/ for EU projects, or https://admin.b360.autodesk.com/ for US projects.
Verify in the Projects tab that you are in the correct account by searching for the name of the project:
Next, visit the Settings area and select Custom Integrations, followed by “Add Custom Integration”:
Select ‘Document Management’ and press ‘Next’:
Select “Invite a Developer” and enter “infrastructure@sensat.co.uk” as the email address and press “Send”:
An email will be sent to the Sensat team containing a form for us to complete. At this stage, please contact your Customer Success representative to verify that you are in the process of setting up the integration.
Once our team has completed the form, the BIM360 admin will need to go back to the admin panel & “approve” the Custom Integration:
Once the integration is set up and approved, contact your Customer Success representative again. At this point you will need to to provide the URLs of the specific ACC folders that you want to sync to with Sensat.
To get a folder URL, select the desired folder in ACC and copy the URL.
Note: Only list folders that directly contain files. If there are additional files within subfolders that need syncing, please list each subfolder separately.
Folder Sync configuration:
One ACC folder can be mapped to one Sensat folder.
A Sensat project can have multiple folders synced from different ACC projects.
A folder in an ACC project can be configured to sync to multiple Sensat projects.
Folder Sync Configuration can then be changed on request.
The following file types will be automatically synchronised: .dgn, .dwg, .glb, .ifc, .dxf, .rvt, .nwd. If other files are present in your ACC folders, they will not be visible in Sensat.
All attributes present on the files will be synchronised and visible in Sensat. However, due to limitations of the ACC API, the ‘Description’ attribute cannot be synchronised.
What you see
Synced folders & files will have a small black ‘sync’ badge over the icon. Hovering over the icons will show the following tooltip: “This [folder|file] is synced from Autodesk Construction Cloud”.
The owner (uploader) of synced files will be set to “Automatic Sync”.
A table of “Attributes from CDE” is shown in the file details section.
Attributes are shown in alphabetical order.
The ‘Last Updated’ and ‘Version’ attributes will always be shown.
Due to limitations of the ACC API the ‘Description’ attribute cannot be synchronised.
Other attributes will only be shown if they are populated in ACC.
Restrictions on folder/file management
Certain manual operations are restricted in Sensat to maintain the consistency of synchronised folders with Autodesk Construction Cloud and ensure it remains the source of truth:
Users cannot delete synced folders.
Users cannot manually move files into or out of a synced folder.
Users cannot manually upload files into a synced folder.
Users cannot rename, move, or delete synced files.
Users cannot edit the “Attributes from CDE” on synced files.