New iTwin JS user

[Michael-kik]

Dear Community,

I have a few questions related iTwin JS:

1. Is it possible to create an offline viewer with local data?
   1.1. If yes, using an offline viewer will not need to use tokens or get authenticated?

2. When creating a web-viewer is it have to be on Bentley cloud or it also can be on a different cloud environment?

3. What will generate costs? Cloud storage, cloud computation - anything else?

4. If I share a link to view - will the person who view have free access? I pay only for the storage and the viewing is free, correct?

5. When iModel is stated, is it the iModel file (i.dgn) created from Microsoft based products?

Regards,
Michael Kikinzon

[ColinKerr]

I have tried to answer your questions as best as possible inline.

1. Is it possible to create an offline viewer with local data?
   1.1. If yes, using an offline viewer will not need to use tokens or get authenticated?

It is possible to create an electron app to view iModels offline so long as you have a snapshot downloaded already. You must login to download the snapshot but once you have it locally no internet connection or login is required to open the iModel. We use the display-test-app in itwinjs-core to open snapshots for testing, but it's not intended to be an example application. A better example might be our desktop template viewer

2. When creating a web-viewer is it have to be on Bentley cloud or it also can be on a different cloud environment?

The web site may be hosted on any cloud. If you are using our hosted backends to serve out the iModel that is hosted in the Bentley cloud. If you are hosting your own backend it can be in any cloud environment.

3. What will generate costs? Cloud storage, cloud computation - anything else?

For details on pricing of Bentley hosted services see the pricing page: https://developer.bentley.com/pricing/

4. If I share a link to view - will the person who view have free access? I pay only for the storage and the viewing is free, correct?

If you are using Bentley hosted backends you pay by viewing hour. If you host your own backend but store your iModels in our hosted services you pay for data egress.

5. When iModel is stated, is it the iModel file (i.dgn) created from Microsoft based products?

An iModel is not an i.dgn*. An iModel is a distributed relational database based on SQLite. An i.dgn is a readonly dgn where all application specific business and graphics data is stored in a generic way that MicroStation can read.

iModels can be produced from many different source files and can combine data from any of those file formats together into one database. Check out our supported formats page for an overview of what is supported. Bentley has announced OpenSite+ which uses iModel as its file format. iTwin.js allows anyone to create a CAD application that stores data in an iModel or a connector that converts some other file format into an iModel.

* At some point in the past i.dgns were referred to as i-models, but that was confusing so we now only refer to them as i.dgn