ODA Announces First Production Release of DGNdirect

The Open Design Alliance (ODA) today announced the first production release of DGNdirect available to ODA members globally. DGNdirect includes a comprehensive feature set for DGN files, including the ability to load V7 and V8 files, convert V7 to V8 files, save V8 files, access data, edit data, render data, and export to PDF and SVG file formats.

Early work on DGNdirect began in 2003 as an independent project. As the ODA platform expanded and matured, the decision was made in 2007 to restart DGNdirect development as an integrated part of the platform. Integrating DGNdirect into the ODA platform provided a number of key benefits: consolidation of common functionality such as geometry and rendering, consistent API styles between DWGdirect and DGNdirect, and clean support for features which utilize both formats such as mixed external references (DWG files referenced from DGN files and vice versa). The new DGNdirect was released for testing in March 2008, and during the past year and a half the feature set and overall quality have grown steadily.

Chief Technical Officer of the ODA, Neil Peterson, stated, “Delivering DGNdirect to ODA members is an enormous success for our development teams and for the ODA platform. Beta versions of DGNdirect have seen heavy use among ODA members for more than a year now, which has helped greatly to stabilize core functionality. DGNdirect builds on the success of our beta releases and contains support for a number of key features including dimensions, True Colors, and improved support for text.”

Arnold van der Weide, ODA President, added, “The ODA platform was originally developed to work with the DWG file format. Later the core platform was expanded to include ADTdirect, a vertical application which supports custom architectural objects, but still within the DWG file format. The release of DGNdirect marks a new level of achievement for our organization—it is a tangible example of how the ODA platform can be used to provide comprehensive support for new file formats. It clearly demonstrates the strength and versatility of the platform, and we expect this type of usage to increase in the future.”

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