tekla-templates

A Claude Code skill for authoring, generating, editing, and debugging Tekla Structures Template Editor templates — the .rpt files behind reports (part / assembly / bolt / material lists, bills of material) and the .tpl files behind drawing tables (title blocks, revision tables, drawing lists).

It lets Claude read, generate, and edit template text directly — a JSON IR pipeline with a deterministic emitter, grammar/attribute validation (-Strict), an SVG preview renderer, a searchable index of the shipped template corpus, and install helpers. The Template Editor GUI is not required.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Trimble. Tekla and Tekla Structures are trademarks of Trimble Inc.

Requirements

• Claude Code — the primary target, and what the install steps below assume. Other coding agents work too; see Use with other agents.
• Windows + PowerShell (the scripts/*.ps1 are PowerShell)
• Tekla Structures installed — needed only to (re)generate the local data assets and to install templates into an environment; template authoring/editing itself does not need it.

Install

Clone into your Claude Code skills directory so the folder lands at ~/.claude/skills/tekla-templates:

git clone https://github.com/LetsConstructIT/tekla-templates.git ~/.claude/skills/tekla-templates

On Windows PowerShell:

git clone https://github.com/LetsConstructIT/tekla-templates.git "$HOME\.claude\skills\tekla-templates"

Restart Claude Code (or start a new session) and the tekla-templates skill is available.

Then ask Claude, in the chat:

Prepare tekla-templates to work

That runs the one-time setup below for you (~2 minutes) and reports which Tekla version it built against. Nothing else to do.

Use with other agents

Very little here is Claude Code-specific. SKILL.md and everything in references/ is plain markdown; scripts/ is PowerShell invoked through a shell. Any agent that can read files in a folder and run shell commands can use this — clone the repo anywhere and point the agent at SKILL.md (paste it, add it to the agent's instruction/rules file, or let the agent open it).

Only the discovery mechanics are Claude Code's: the ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ location, the /tekla-templates command, and automatic loading based on the YAML description in SKILL.md's frontmatter. Elsewhere you supply that context yourself.

One thing to carry over: every scripts\… path in SKILL.md is relative to the skill folder, not the working directory. Tell the agent where it cloned the repo, or it will look in the wrong place.

First-time setup (one-time, per Tekla version)

Two data assets are derived from your local Tekla install and are not shipped in this repo, so they're built once on your machine. Easiest route is to ask Claude — "prepare tekla-templates to work" — which runs exactly the script below.

To do it yourself, from the skill folder:

scripts\Initialize-TeklaTemplates.ps1           # builds whatever is missing
scripts\Initialize-TeklaTemplates.ps1 -Check    # status only (exit 0 = ready, 1 = setup needed)
scripts\Initialize-TeklaTemplates.ps1 -Force    # rebuild, e.g. after upgrading Tekla

It auto-detects the newest installed version; -TeklaRoot C:\TeklaStructures\<version> pins one, and -Path <folder> folds in a firm/project library (or stands in for a missing local install). Re-running is safe — assets that are already current are skipped.

Built	File	Used by
Grammar allow-list	assets/template-grammar.json	-Strict validation
JSON schema	assets/template-schema.json	JSON-IR schema gate (pure function of the grammar)
Corpus index	assets/template-index.json	Find-TeklaTemplateExamples.ps1

The grammar and index each sweep the whole shipped corpus (2,688 files / 128 MB) — ~30 s and ~65 s, once per Tekla version. Until they exist the dependent features degrade gracefully — each script tells you which one to run — and everything else works normally.

Why those two files aren't in the repo

template-grammar.json and template-index.json are harvested by scanning Trimble/Tekla's proprietary shipped .tpl / .rpt files. Rather than redistribute data derived from those files, each user regenerates them from the Tekla installation they already license. See .gitignore.

What's in here

Path	What it is
SKILL.md	The skill instructions Claude reads
scripts/	PowerShell: grammar/index/schema generators, JSON-IR convert, preview renderer, validator, installer
tests/	Development-only regression suite (round-trip losslessness proof over the shipped corpus)
references/	Attribute cookbook, functions, formulas, file format, recipes, debugging
assets/skeleton_*	Authored starter templates + SVG previews
assets/template-schema.json	JSON Schema for the template IR (shipped)

License

MIT © Grzegorz Olszewski. Covers the scripts, docs, and authored templates in this repository. The locally generated data assets are derived from your own Tekla installation and are outside this repository.