Build your own connector

Nexus PLM reaches into CAD and Office through addins that all implement the same contract. Three ship today. If the tool your team uses is not one of them, the contract is the same and you can write your own.

What ships today

CATIA V5 — check-out, open, save, new-from-template, search and recursive BOM staging, driven from a toolbar inside CATIA.

FreeCAD — BOM sync, lifecycle and check-out badges drawn onto the model tree, and PLM properties surfaced in the property panel.

Microsoft Word — check documents in and out, and push template fields into the document, without leaving Word.

The shape of a connector

Every connector implements the same operations: authenticate, search, open, check-out, check-in, save-as-new, revise, release, extract structure, read and write template fields, and subscribe to events.

The host application differs enormously. The contract does not. That is deliberate: it means behaviour is consistent whichever tool an engineer happens to be sitting in, and it means a new connector is a well-defined piece of work rather than an open-ended one.

What the SDK does for you

The addin SDK carries the parts that are the same everywhere: the API contract and its data types, transport and authentication, a retry policy for flaky calls, event subscription and delivery, and the toast and progress plumbing.

What is left for you to write is the part only you can write — the CAD-specific half: how to ask your application what is open, how to read its assembly structure, and how to make it open a file the platform hands back.

How it runs

Connectors do not talk to the Engine directly. A local relay service brokers between the addin and the platform, holding the auth token, delivering events and retrying failed calls. That keeps credential handling out of the addin and means a check-out performed in one client shows up in the others.

Source

The SDK and the reference connectors are being prepared for public release. Once they are published, the repositories and a worked example will be linked here.

If you want to build a connector before then, get in touch and we will work through it with you.