Creating extensions for the Autodesk viewer

I’ve been working on a prototype implementation of a research project that makes use of the View & Data API for its visualization. It’s interesting to get back into using this API, especially as it’s a fundamental piece of the Forge platform.

As we expect this particular application to grow, over time, we’re using extensions to house logically separate parts of the UI implementation. Extensions are a great mechanism for encapsulating functionality: they’re basically JavaScript objects that have load() and unload() methods that are called when the viewer loads/unloads them.

A number of samples in the Autodesk samples repository make use of extensions, particularly the View & Data Gallery (source on GitHub) and the Viewer Extensions site (source on GitHub).

Here’s the implementation of…