poka.sh

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DSBXML

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DesignBuilder DSB-XML Preview.

At a glance
Original creator DesignBuilder Software Ltd
Purpose DesignBuilder's XML export of a building energy model: sites, buildings, blocks, zones and surfaces with their settings.
Extensions .dsbxml
Poka parser poka-dsbxml
Viewer poka-tree-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B3 Core (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B3 Core. Only the main content type or types are decoded (for example geometry but not materials, layers or annotations, or only one version family). The list of gaps is substantial.

Confidence: high (the reviewer read the code and a test that proves the claim). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-16: poka-dsbxml src/lib.rs (single-pass scan, hierarchy and census), src/geometry.rs, main.rs, tests/samples.rs, tests/geometry.rs and tests/common; corpus has 24 DesignBuilder dsbXML files saved as .xml and routed by root element (dsb-models-.xml and dsb-models_dhvac-.xml), including the Tutorial Model (about 8,500 Attribute elements). Covers current dsbXML exports (version 8.x); the older DesignBuilderData root has a unit-test fixture only. Read: the export header, the Site, Building, BuildingBlock, Zone, Surface, Opening, HVAC loop, assembly and component block hierarchy as named rows, an element census, and a 3D view of zone bodies.

What Poka does not read

  • Attribute values are not shown: the model's settings (site, building, block and zone attributes such as activity, construction, glazing, lighting and HVAC data) are only counted
  • Tables and their rows (FieldName, Category, Row) are shown as row counts only
  • surface adjacencies are not interpreted, so partitions and external walls are not distinguished
  • HVAC loops and assemblies appear as hierarchy rows with their contents collapsed to counts
  • block profile bodies, inner-surface bodies, internal partitions, voids and furniture are not drawn
  • site orientation is reported and not applied
  • the older DesignBuilderData form (version 7.x) gets a tree only, with no geometry, and is untested against a real file
  • the tree is capped at 8,000 hierarchy rows and 25 element types in the census

Background

The schema is large (DesignBuilder.xsd declares 3,316 elements) and a real model is dominated by attributes and 3D points: the parser's own documentation quotes a ten-zone HVAC model with 34,609 Attribute and 17,880 Point3D elements, which the review did not recount. Poka therefore shows the building hierarchy with the bulk collapsed into counts, and draws the zones in 3D when the model has zone geometry.

Versions

Version Identifier Poka Note
dsbXML <dsbXML> Read

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • quick-xml (used; MIT; Rust)
  • dsbxml (candidate; MIT; Python; https://pypi.org/pypi/dsbxml/json) — Reads, edits and writes DesignBuilder XML via pydantic-xml; MIT is stated in the README (PyPI licence field is empty); source is github.com/DesignBuilderSoftware/db-schema, which I did not load; v1.3.0 per PyPI metadata

Sources