Converting IFC schema to EdgeDB schema (ESDL)

The EdgeIO class uses the built-in IFC-schema in IfcOpenShell to construct .esdl files which represents the EdgeDB schema.

The following sections describes how to construct the IFC schema using python and the EdgeIO class.

EdgeDB using partial IFC Schema

Choose to base your EdgeDB instance on IFC elements only relevant to a specific IFC file (useful during development of the EdgeDB schema generator)

import pathlib
from ifcdb import EdgeIO


ifc_path = pathlib.Path("files/tessellated-item.ifc")

with EdgeIO(db_schema_dir="db/dbschema", database_name="testdb") as io:  
    io.create_schema_from_ifc_file(ifc_path=ifc_path)
    io.setup_database(delete_existing_migrations=True)

EdgeDB using the entire IFC Schema

To set up an EdgeDB instance using the complete IFC schema you will need to specify ifc_schema to define which version of the IFC schema you want the database schema to represent.

Note

At the time of writing (12.08.22), EdgeDB v2.1+c600476 is able to create the migration for the IFC schema in about 3.5 hours, but unfortunately unable to pass the entire IFC schema definition to postgres due to the
text size being too large.

INFO 207 2022-08-11T19:04:37.396 postgres: invalid message length.

This has been adressed in https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/issues/3946

EdgeDB using specific IFC entities

To create a schema using only specific IFC entities (and all related entities) it is possible to do the following.

from ifcdb import EdgeIO

with EdgeIO(db_schema_dir="db/dbschema", ifc_schema="IFC4X1", database_name="testdb") as io:
    io.create_schema(entities=["IfcQuantityArea"])
    io.setup_database(delete_existing_migrations=True)