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Onbox is a free and open source framework to help you build modern cross platform Revit applications in a similar fashion of Angular and ASP.Net core.

The framework and its libraries are designed focusing on modularity, testability and code reuse, it is heavly inspired in modern front end and back end web development, to help you transition from platform to platform without major workflow disruptions.

Documentation is in its early stages, (yeah I know.. documentation is important). Checkout the documentation here.

Checkout the API Docs here.

You can check out our free Cross Platform Revit Presentation on Autodesk University 2020 to get a full hands-on lab on how to create a simple application using the Framework.

The presentation also includes class handout, slide deck downloads, and links to sample repositories where you play around with the code.

Checkout how you can get started here.

Templates can be found here. And here is how you install them.

As stated above, Onbox is all about modularity, so the framework itself is composed of several libraries that focuses in a specific scope and can be easly extendend or replaced:

We have built parts of several applications using some of these libraries, our current working project, Shedmate app is the one that relies on it the most. I would say parts of it because only some libraries existed when we started coding the app. Shedmate is a web-based 3d configurator that needs to process the same data models in different places: Revit, our ASPNet Cloud server, and our front end Angular app. The cool thing here is that we can share services between the Revit and ASP and even run a script to generate our data models in typescript for Angular!

None of the features that Onbox provides out of the box are really trying to be the best ones in the industry. The framework is made with simplicity in mind, we tried to simplify the implementations as much as we could, even when we wanted to provide more functionality, we tried to make it easy to consume simpler versions of the APIs.

The framework aims for modularity, so the idea here is that you can introduce new functionality by yourself. Our libraries, e.g. Container, Mapper, State Management, Async are tiny and are not trying to solve every single problem or implement every single feature, also they can always be replaced by more mature ones out there.

The framework also aims to be flexible, if you have an existing Revit plugin and want to give Onbox a try, you would just swap the implementation for your ExternalApplication and then for the ExternalCommand(s) you want the container to be injected on. You are good to go!

With the loosely coupled architecture that the framework helps you to build, you can then use any testing frameworks like Dynamo's Revit Tester Framework or Geberit's Revit Test Runner. We are even using Design Automation on Forge to unit test our Revit Apps, that way, everything can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline.

Everyone is welcome to use it and collaborate! Being MIT licensed, you can take any parts of the framework and modify it to your usage, this is simple, because the libraries are tiny. The same thing for eventual bugs, you can step in and fix them yourself or log an issue on Github. We would appreciate any code pull requests, contributions to the documentation, and publications you make for it. The idea is to have a mature Framework so everyone can collect the benefits.