The Building Coder

Performance Profiling

I should be preparing my Revit API training in Warsaw, which is coming up next week, and instead I still find myself working on other more interesting topics such as performance profiling at the same time. I hope the training participants will find this interesting as well. New Filtering Motivates Benchmarking The reason why I am so urgently interested in this right now is that the Revit 2011 API provides a whole new filtering API, i.e. for extracting certain specific... Read more →

Revit 2011 Product GUIDs

We discussed issues related to the Revit install path and the product GUIDs for versions up to and including Revit 2010 last year. The install path is less of an issue nowadays, since there is no longer a need to determine the location of Revit.ini to install an add-in, because you can use an add-in manifest file instead. Another more exciting reason is the availability of the new add-in utility DLL described below. Still, the product GUID may be important... Read more →

Porting the Building Coder Samples to Revit 2011

Last year, I postponed the porting of The Building Coder samples to Revit 2010 until pretty late, because I wanted to avoid forcing anyone to update. This time around, I am doing it pretty early, and have a good reason for that as well. The migration from the Revit 2010 to the 2011 API is not quite as painless as in previous updates, because the whole Revit API has been significantly restructured and future-proofed. For details, please refer to the... Read more →

DevCamp, Devlabs and Updated API Training Schedule

DevCamp Registration for the AEC DevCamp on June 7-9, 2010, in Boston, MA has opened. This is the software developer conference for anyone considering or actively developing applications and integrations with Autodesk architecture, engineering, and construction technologies. Besides all versions of Revit, this also includes AutoCAD Architecture, Navisworks, and the infrastructure technologies Civil 3D, Map 3D and MapGuide Enterprise. During the three days, we will be holding more than twenty training classes on the various APIs, including introductory classes for... Read more →

Adding Non-Commands to the Revit Ribbon

In between all the hullabaloo about the new version of Revit, here is some news dealing with the old one and the Revit Python shell implemented by Daren Thomas. Daren now found a way to add new items such as command buttons to a Revit ribbon panel without actually having any real underlying external command implementation to hook them up to. He uses Reflection.Emit to simulate the missing IExternalCommand implementation. Here is Daren's own description: I just published a post... Read more →

API Wish List Survey Results

Picking up on Kean's announcement of the availability of the 2011 family of Autodesk products I thought I might mention how the list of Revit 2011 API features that I published yesterday ties in with the Revit API wish list survey that we held last summer. Here are the results of the survey, with the areas that are addressed by the Revit 2011 API highlighted in bold: Better integration into Revit user interface. Interactive user selection of element ends, intersections... Read more →

Revit 2011 Release Date

I just discovered that the Revit 2011 release date has gone public on Revit3d.com, and thought that might be intersting to share here as well: April 8. Read more →

Revit 2011 is Coming

Guy Robinson said it in May 2009: Revit 2011 - the most significant release EVER. He was referring to something completely different and might have meant it more as a joke at the time, but from an API point of view, it is suddenly true today. The autodesk.com web site alphabetical list of products now points to new releases of all three flavours of Revit: Revit Architecture – Brochure Revit MEP – Brochure Revit Structure – Brochure Leaving the product... Read more →

Revit API Resource and Getting Started Guide

I was very enthusiastic about Rod Howarth's Autodesk University presentation, and especially the Revit API resource guide and suggestions for getting started with the Revit API that he presented in the second half. Rod has now very friendlily published his Revit API Resource Guide. To whet your appetite for having a closer look at this invaluable information, here is a table of contents I put together: Resource Overview C# / VB.Net Resources Get a good book View information online SDK... Read more →

Using Process.Start to Open a Project or Family

Here is a question that comes up from time to time on how to open and display a project or family file in the Revit user interface. I mentioned a workaround in the answer to a comment by Nadim, and now I think it is time to promote this little information nugget to a proper post to make it easier to find. Question: I need to open and display an existing project or family in the Revit user interface. I... Read more →

Duplicate Mark Values

We already discussed the issue of door marks and implemented the Building Coder sample command CmdListMarks to demonstrate listing and modifying them programmatically. Here are a couple of additional questions that came up recently in this context from Dave Echols of Hankins and Anderson, Inc. which led to some important hints on performance and exception handling: Question: We have some large Revit models that have thousands of errors due to duplicate mark values. On several of these, we have cleaned... Read more →

Family Problems Missing Components

The title of this question from my colleague Greg Wesner of Autodesk is so nice, I just had to add it to the blog, even though we have actually already provided the explanation a long time ago. Question: Family problems... ... no, not that kind – Revit Family problems :-) This seems so simple, yet I'm way too tired to try to figure this out. I'm porting some code that I didn't write from Revit 2009 to 2010. I'm getting... Read more →

MEP Hangers

We repeatedly touched on various topics related to the Revit MEP API. Here is another little item that is a bit more out of the way, some background information on MEP duct and pipe supports, also known as hangers. Question: In the description of the MechanicalEquipment class, the Revit MEP API help says that "The Mechanical Equipment object can only be queried in Autodesk Revit MEP." I would like to add supports to ducts and pipes. Could you please tell... Read more →

NewSweptBlend

I am still awfully busy preparing for upcoming Revit API trainings and should be working more for that and less on the blog, actually. Anyway, here an important nugget if information from another case handled by my colleagues Phil Xia and Saikat Bhattacharya on how to set up the input profile for the NewSweptBlend method. We already described the recommended approach for debugging form creation problems, and it obviously applies to the NewSweptBlend method as well, but the information provided... Read more →

Object Relationships in VB

We recently presented Saikat Bhattacharya's neat little object relationship analyser and displayer, implemented in C#. Yesterday I received a very friendly submission from Jose Guia saying "Thought I would share my code as well, ... I converted the project to VB for sharing." I compiled his solution and it works fine for me. I did run into two little issues which were easy to solve, both of them involving namespaces: Different access to imported namespaces. Different namespace when exporting the... Read more →

Access Extrusions in a Family

I am very busy right now preparing for the next Revit API training class which will be held in Warsaw, Poland, just after Easter. For a full list of upcoming Revit API classes, please refer to the ADN API training schedule. Meanwhile, here is a short and sweet little issue which clarifies the relationship between project elements such as family instances and the geometric primitives contained within them, which are family elements: Question: I am using families of category Curtain... Read more →

AddInManager

We have had a lot of discussion lately on effectively loading and debugging Revit add-ins. John Morse suggested a technique to be able dynamically reload an already loaded add-in for debugging purposes, and we posted some updates on that yesterday. We also had an internal discussion on how to effectively manage the many SDK samples. As I have mentioned in the past, I use RvtSamples to load all the existing SDK samples plus all the ADN and Building Coder ones.... Read more →

Dynamically Load and Debug Plug-ins

I have two little updates on the article on John Morse's technique for dynamically loading a Revit add-in without having to restart Revit. Debugging an Assembly Loaded from a Byte Array First, the initial comments posted by Guy Robinson and John Morse on the topic led to some further insights, the gist of which seems to be that if you compile an add-in targeting AnyCPU then you should have not problems using this technique on x64 or x32 systems. The... Read more →

NewWall with Opening

We recently discussed a comment from Mike King on how to specify openings when constructing a slab, and that reminded me of some interesting sample code I received from Ning in a comment on using the NewWall method and passing in a CurveArray containing its edges to create a wall with a sloped profile. Ning's issue was to create a new wall with a CurveArray containing more than one loop. What Ning's code does is to retrieve the elevation profile... Read more →

Object Relationships

We already discussed several uses of the Document.Delete method to discover object relationships, e.g. the relationship between a tag and the tagged element, a wall and its footing, host and its hosted elements, the title block of a sheet, or host elements and their openings for the purposes of gross material quantity determination. Another use of it is to obtain the unmodified element geometry. Here is a very neat little sample named ObjRel by Saikat Bhattacharya that shows how to... Read more →

Nested Family Utility Methods

Nested families seem to be a recurring topic right now. We just recently discussed how to test whether a family instance in a project file is nested inside another, and before that we addressed nested instance geometry and creating a nested family. The first place to look for information on using the Revit API in the context of families is the overview of the family API with the associated labs and the materials and recording of the webcast we presented... Read more →

Connector Orientation

I am still looking through all the interesting cases my colleagues dealt with during my absence. Here is another one handled by Joe Ye on the width and height orientation of a Revit MEP connector: Question: Given an Autodesk.Revit.DB.Connector object, is it possible to know where the height and width dimensions are relative to the Connector.CoordinateSystem? The width and height directions do seem to be aligned to either the coordinate system X or Y axis, but not consistently one way... Read more →

Ensure Valid Material is Set

In some of the very early posts, we explored how to access the materials assigned to an individual element, a family instance, or a wall. However, we never presented anything to handle materials set at the category level. Here is recent case handled by my colleague Saikat Bhattacharya on how to ensure that the material of a beam or column is set to a valid value, either at the element or category level: Question: I am trying to extract the... Read more →

Reload an Add-In to Debug

I received a very friendly suggestion from John Morse of CorTek, Inc to publish his solution for reloading a Revit add-in into Revit without having to shut down and restart Revit each time. This can greatly speed up debugging iterations. In Revit 2008, it was possible to use the Visual Studio 'Edit and Continue' feature to achieve the same thing, but this functionality has been unavailable for Revit plug-ins for some time now, as we already noted a couple of... Read more →

NewEllipse Parameters

Here I am back at work again. I see I have a large number of backed up comments to answer, and lots of other interesting new information to discuss. One recent case handled by my colleague Joe Ye discovered an issue with the API documentation of the NewEllipse method that is worth pointing out: Question: I am having an issue converting ellipses from AutoCAD into Revit. I have the geometry of the ellipse converted correctly, but there are some issues... Read more →