Basic example of how to use it?

[MartinOrdinateur]

Hiya, this might sound like a stupid question, but I'm still getting my bearings in the BIMServer project. I noticed that BimQL is a part (plugin) of this and the basic principle sounds very promising.

However, one thing I can't seem to figure out, is how to use it... -_- What I've been trying to do so far, is setting up a BIMClient, connecting it to the server and somehow coerce something resembling a BimQL instance to actually query data. But so far I have two questions:

1. is it possible to use a basic BIMClient for this?
2. Can you give a step by step example of how to execute a BIM Query using the BIMQL plugin?

Thanks in advance.

[MartinOrdinateur]

Ok.. So meanwhile in a stroke of luck, I found this code: https://code.google.com/p/bimserver/source/browse/trunk/Tests/src/org/bimserver/tests/TestBimQlSoap.java which gives me a basic idea of how to communicate with the server, using BimQL.

Running from the BIMServer test-suite the test placing walls (Test 2: Create 10 walls, delete 1) It gives me a managable dataset to test queries on.. So far, I got the following conclusions:

Going on the examples on http://bimql.org/select/: "Select $Var1 Where $Var1.Attribute.GlobalId = wall7" "Select $Var1 Where $Var1.EntityType = IfcWall" "Select $Var1"

all work. But expanding on that and for example the following variations: "Select $Var1 Where $Var1.Attribute.Name = 'wall 7'" "Select $Var1 Where $Var1.Attribute.Oid = 590572" don't really do anything. (return empty sets..)

Is there any formal description of how the BimQL works? Or perhaps what information is stored where in '$Var1' so I can query it?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards, Martin Stam.