The NIST IFC File Analyzer (IFA) generates a spreadsheet from an IFC file. Download a pre-built Windows version of IFA with the Release link (zip file) to the right. Follow the instructions below to build your own version of IFA from the source code.
Microsoft Excel is required to generate spreadsheets. CSV (comma-separated values) files will be generated if Excel is not installed.
Download the IFA files from GitHub to a directory on your computer.
- The name of the directory is not important
- The IFC File Analyzer is written in Tcl
- Some of the Tcl code is based on CAWT
freeWrap wraps the IFA Tcl code to create an executable.
- Download freewrap651.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/freewrap/files/freewrap/freeWrap%206.51/. More recent versions of freeWrap will not work with wrapping IFA.
- Extract freewrap.exe and put it in the same directory as the IFA files that were downloaded from GitHub.
Several Tcl packages not included in freeWrap also need to be installed.
- teapot.zip contains the additional Tcl packages
- Create a directory C:/Tcl/lib
- Unzip teapot.zip to the 'lib' directory to create C:/Tcl/lib/teapot
- Edit the source code file ifa.tcl and uncomment the lines at the top of the file that start with 'lappend auto_path C:/Tcl/lib/teapot/package/...'
- Open a command prompt window and change to the directory with the IFA Tcl files and freewrap.
- To generate the executable ifa.exe, enter the command: freewrap -f ifa-files.txt
You must install and run the NIST version of the IFC File Analyzer before running your own version.
- Click on Release to the right and download the zip file.
- Extract IFC-File-Analyzer.exe from the zip file, run it and process an IFC file to install other software.
- Some features are not available in the user-built version including tooltips and unzipping compressed IFC files.
- Internally at NIST, IFA is built with ActiveTcl 8.5.18 32-bit and the Tcl Dev Kit which is now an open source project.