Overview
Tekla Web Service – On-Demand Drawing & Model Generation in the Cloud. At BlueScope Steel North America, detailers waited hours for modeling specialists to export drawings, and batch-generating large shop-drawing sets bogged down local workstations.
Apps By TAP built a cloud Tekla Web Service that auto-builds models and scrubs drawings on demand—zero manual effort for BlueScope teams. Requests flow from existing desktop apps through an ASP.NET Core API and Azure Service Bus to headless Tekla workers.
The Challenge
- Self-service drawings: Detailers waited hours for manual exports from modeling specialists.
- Compute-heavy operations: Local workstations bogged down when batch-generating large shop-drawing sets.
- Multi-brand scalability: VP Buildings and BMP each needed unique title blocks and naming conventions.
- Secure file delivery: IT required that finished drawings land on an on-prem server behind the firewall.
Our Approach
Stateless request API
An ASP.NET Core Web API receives drawing requests from existing desktop apps, validates the JSON payloads and publishes them to Azure Service Bus.
Two-stage worker pipeline
- Model worker: spins up a headless Tekla instance in Azure, opens the correct template, applies job parameters and saves the model to Blob Storage.
- Drawing worker: pulls the model, auto-creates drawings, runs a “scrub” routine (layer cleanup, title-block injection, revision stamps) and exports the drawings.
Hybrid file delivery
Completed packages are pushed to BlueScope’s on-prem file server, and the requester receives an email with the download path.
Technology Stack
- ASP.NET Core – the request API. See our APIs & backends service.
- Azure Service Bus, App Service and Blob Storage – queueing, hosting and model storage. Part of our cloud solutions work.
- Tekla Open API (headless) – model and drawing automation. See our Tekla & SDS2 plugins service.
- Windows worker services and SQL Server – processing and job records.
Results & Impact
BlueScope’s engineers now generate production-ready drawings on demand without monopolizing Tekla licenses or workstations, accelerating project schedules and reducing human error. The service complements the Tekla plugin suite and secure file-transfer gateway we built for BlueScope.
