AutoVue 20 included our first step towards providing a rich hotspotting capability that will allow visualization capabilities to be very tightly integrated into a wide range of applications.

The idea is to have a close link between the visual representation of an object or place, and the business objects associated with that object or place.

We've been working with our partner Enigma to enable this capability in their parts catalogue - the screenshot above shows what it looks like - the image on the right is a trimmed down version of AutoVue displaying a drawing of the various parts in an interactive way - when you click on item '6' in the AutoVue drawing, the appropriate item is highlighted in the parts catalogue - making it easy to select the parts you need, and to ensure that the correct parts are selected. The integration works in both directions - when you select a part in the part catalogue, the appropriate part is highlighted in the drawing as well.

To get slightly technical for a moment, this is a simple javascript integration - the external application provides a javascript callback that AutoVue calls whenever an item is clicked on, and AutoVue provides a javascript function to call when an item is selected in the external application. There are also direct java APIs available.

This makes it easy to tie AutoVue into many types of applications - you can imagine in an asset lifecycle management application being able to click on the appropriate asset in a drawing to create a work-order, instead of finding the right asset ID to enter. Or being able to click on a part or sub-assembly to trigger a change order in a product lifecycle management application.

We're pretty excited about the possibilities that this capability opens up, and plan on expanding on it a lot in the future.

Would this be useful in your enterprise applications? What kinds of integrations like this would be useful for you? Let us know in the comments below!