APIs and SDKs

You want to develop an application that directly accesses the backend systems of ShapeDiver, bypassing the Viewer? This section is for you.

If you are interested in frontend development using our 3D Viewer, please head over to Viewer.

Geometry Backend

Platform Backend

sdTF - Structured data transfer format

API disambiguation

Geometry Backend API

The Geometry Backend is where your Grasshopper models are hosted, computations are run, and results of computations are cached. Use the Geometry Backend API to do things like

triggering computations and exports,
listing the parameters (the inputs) and the outputs of your models,
requesting cached computation results, and
querying logs for your model.

As an example, our Viewer is a client application of the Geometry Backend API.

Depending on your use case you need a ticket (an API key) and/or a JWT for accessing your model using the Geometry Backend API. Please jump to section API Authorization to read about this.

We operate several Geometry Backend systems, whose computational resources are shared among our users. Enterprise customers are provided with a dedicated Geometry Backend system.

We offer SDKs for .NET and TypeScript to simplify the usage of the Geometry Backend API.

Platform Backend API

The Platform Backend is where users of the ShapeDiver Platform and their models are managed. The Platform Backend is the central authority that manages and provides access to your models running on one of the Geometry Backend systems. Use the Platform Backend API to do things like

listing or updating properties of your models,
creating new models (this also involves the Geometry Backend API for uploading the model),
requesting tickets and JWTs for your models (allowing to access them using the Geometry Backend API),
querying aggregated analytics for your user.

As an example, the Online platform is a client application of the Platform Backend API. We also offer SDKs for .NET and TypeScript for the Platform Backend.

Viewer API

Our Viewer offers an API on its own, which is not a REST API but simply a well-defined API used to control the viewer when embedding it into web applications.
The Viewer is a client application of the Geometry Backend, it talks to a Geometry Backend system using the Geometry Backend API explained above.