Autodesk

Meet Autodesk a globally recognized leader in design and engineering software, known for its innovative solutions that empower professionals across industries to bring their creative visions to life. Autodesk has established itself as a trusted partner for millions of users worldwide, helping them achieve greater efficiency, precision, and creativity in their projects.

In addition to its flagship offerings like AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360, Autodesk serves a wide range of industries, including architecture, manufacturing, construction, and media.

Autodesk Consulting provides support to customers to enable data-centric workflows, and integrating systems with custom app development leveraging Autodesk Platform Services.

Autodesk consults for a wide variety of companies that need a better way to move data and manage their digital project delivery in a way that is easily visible for all stakeholders to see the progress. Up until now, many relied on legacy, disconnected workflows using spreadsheets or other 3rd party systems, disjoint from where the live project data is stored.

These companies hired Autodesk Consulting to help them move their data more efficiently and visibly to create insights. The main parts that they needed help with were:

• Document Management: This feature helps construction teams organize, store, and share important documents (e.g., blueprints, contracts, plans, 3D designs and 2D drawings data) efficiently in a Common Data Environment.
• RFI (Request for Information): RFIs are formal requests used during construction to clarify aspects of a project. Autodesk Build allows users to manage and track these RFIs within the platform.

Autodesk was looking to build an app for its clients to exchange information between design and construction. These companies wanted automated workflows to migrate RFI submissions and handle the repetitive, time-consuming and error prone actions like document uploads, data entry, attachments and comment logs for collaboration.

Paolo Serra, a Principal Implementation Consultant at Autodesk, was tasked with this project. Paolo is a Python developer and was looking for a web based solution. He didn’t want to use React and Javascript, but still wanted to build a production grade web app.

The solution had to be cloud based, to connect to existing systems and they only had 60 days to deliver it all.

Failure to deliver the value and results, due to contract obligations, could lead to court litigations, financial losses, damaged reputation and losing the customer. And as Consulting services are available for high-end customers in the context of Enterprise Business Agreements, there was a lot at stake.

Paolo explored other Python web app frameworks like Mesop and FastUI, but neither supported React—a requirement for all Autodesk products to ensure consistent styling with Autodesk certified React components. Company policy mandates building on Weave, a local company fork of the Material UI React library.

He explored Streamlit, Taipy and Dash, but didn’t like the way they looked and again did not have an easy way to use the required React components. He wanted to focus on business logic not low level implementation details.

Reflex’s React wrapping feature allowed Paolo to integrate the Weave React component library—a company requirement—directly into his app.

Their team was able to leverage reusable high level components to build out UI with clean code including:

• A custom wrapped Treeview component to show the file directory
• A wrapped ModelViewer React component to view and collaborate on 2D drawings and 3D models via Autodesks Platform Services Viewer
• A table component to show and filter the data

The team was able to:

• Connect to different data sources using Python code they already had available
• Hook the app up with Autodesk auth
• Self-host their reflex app with their internal infrastructure, deploying to Azure

Paolo and his team chose Reflex to develop a production-ready web app fully in Python. Reflex offered several key advantages, including:

• Allowing Autodesk to achieve more with fewer resources, significantly reducing overall costs

• Rapid prototyping, ensuring faster, more collaborative development

• Saving Autodesk 25% on project timelines, delivering results faster and impressing clients.

• The ability to wrap their local react library, which was a company requirement, and create reusable high-level components

• Future proofing their code by writing it in Python

Paolo and his team have now worked on three other projects for different customers with Reflex:

1. A content management service to entirely redesign the way in which their consulting is delivered, from an in person experience to an online digital platform for consulting
2. An information registry project with digital delivery of artifacts
3. An analysis component dashboard which understands insights into what is happening in a companies local data, draws conclusions, and link to all the relevant Autodesk services