The Building Coder

Creating a Warning Using the Failure API

The Failure API enables both failure definition and handling capabilities – The ability to define and post failures from within API code when a user-visible problem has occurred – The ability to respond to failures posted by Revit and by API code through code in your application This also enables the creation of a modeless warning message to the user... Read more →

What's New in the Revit 2011 API

This is the second instalment of a series publishing the information provided in the 'What's New' sections of the past few Revit API releases help file RevitAPI.chm. The first instalment covering What's New in the Revit 2010 API explains my motivation for this and provides an overview of the other releases. We now move on to Revit 2011, looking at: Major renovations Major enhancements Small enhancements and changes First, however, an update on my vacation so far. Snowstorm in Italy... Read more →

Intermediate API Update Releases

I recently mentioned the availability of the Revit 2012 Update Release 2 and my surprise that some people prefer not to update, which gave rise to a couple of vehement comments. I myself seldom ran into issues with incompatibilities between intermediate releases, but now one affecting the API cropped up: Question: Using the IUpdater interface, I can do the following with the Revit 2012 API: ElementId paramId = new ElementId( BuiltInParameter.ROOM_NUMBER ); UpdaterRegistry.AddTrigger( GetUpdaterId(), elementFilter, Element.GetChangeTypeParameter( paramId ) ); The... Read more →

String Search ADN Plugin of the Month

Best regards from Andalusia! Here is just a short note to point out that my first ADN Plugin of the Month has been published on Autodesk Labs: the November ADN Plugin of the Month is the Revit String Search. Look at the developer notes at the end for reasons why you should take a look at this :) Description Search Revit project elements and their parameter values for a given string value. Standard string search options can be specified to... Read more →

Modeless Loose Connector Navigator Update

Here is an update to my modeless loose connector navigator, which I created as a sample application to demonstrate how to set up a modeless dialogue to drive Revit using the Idling event. Please refer to the original post for a full description. The original Revit 2011 version had one flaw: the external command it implements subscribes to the Idling event. That means that a new subscription is added for every call to the command. Also, the subscription was never... Read more →

Ritchie's Revit API Introduction

We have already seen a couple of interesting contributions by Ritchie Jackson of the Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme at UCL, the University College London: Blends, Hermite splines and derivatives Complexity versus constructability The Autodesk Project Vasari API Flattening a non planar extrusion profile Here is another topic, an introduction to the Revit API for programming novices for the London Revit User Group LRUG. Knowing Ritchie, it includes a couple of novel aspects: Focus on VSTA macros. Comparison of manual... Read more →

Reducing Revit Debug Verbosity

Many people have complained about the amount of noise caused by the ribbon in the Visual Studio debug output window. Kean Walmsley just pointed out that you can easily make AutoCAD less noisy when debugging by adding a couple of lines to the acad.exe.config file, which lives in the same folder as the acad.exe you are debugging, such as C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2011, to ask the WPF binding trace provider to lower the volume. Since Revit uses the same internal ribbon... Read more →

Ribbon Panel Title Conflict

Here is another exploration into the inner workings of the Revit ribbon by Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He says: If you try to add a new Ribbon panel whose title is already used by another Add-In panel, it will throw an exception. You therefore have to ensure that no other third party panel uses the same text as you do. The Revit API method GetRibbonPanels will not find panels that are not yet loaded, and there is no... Read more →

The FaceWall Class and Slanted Walls

We have never previously taken looked at the FaceWall class. Here is a question on this handled by Joe Ye, which also addresses an old comment by Deric Wallace on creating a wall with a sloped profile. Deric wishes to create a wall like this programmatically: This was not easily achievable in Revit 2010. The access to slanted walls is improved in Revit 2011, as we can see from Joe's answer below: Question: How can I use the API to... Read more →

Structural Analysis Links to Revit Structure

We had a look at available Revit Structure API resources almost a year ago, and also published the ADN Revit Structure labs and an analysis link sample. Furthermore, we discussed the enhancements made in the Revit Structure 2011 API, but the labs and link samples published are still based on Revit 2010. Let's update that to Revit Structure 2011 right here and now: here is rst_src_2011-03-01.zip. It includes the ADN DevTech labs and link sample code previously discussed, as well... Read more →

Family API Labs for Revit 2011

Someone very friendlily pointed out that the Family API labs available from The Building Coder are only provided for the Revit 2010 API and asked for a revised version based on Revit 2011. Due to the extent of the changes between the two API's, the previous samples do not run with Revit 2011. Thank you for pointing that out! Here is the current version of the Family API Labs for Revit 2011. Read more →

Pimp my AutoCAD or Revit Ribbon

Here is another fun possibility to access and manipulate the Revit ribbon explored by Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He says: I've played around and found a possibility to modify the appearance of the AutoCAD and Revit ribbon bars. This is the Revit ribbon bar in its usual colour scheme: Now let's change the panel background image and panel headers: What about using a gradient fill and changing the tab header font: The style is persistent, even if you... Read more →

External Application Attributes

Arnošt Löbel added a comment on the little zero document external application that I presented last week, pointing out that the transaction attribute (e.g. TransactionMode.Manual) is only applicable to external commands, not applications. As he says, it should be treated as an add-in declaration error, but since it is harmless, it is quietly ignored. (It could be treated as an error in the future though.) The question is also how the regeneration attribute is handled. It was originally intended for... Read more →

Command and Conquer When Switching Views

Today, February 3, is the first day of the Chinese New Year and the beginning of the spring festival, which lasts for fifteen days. This is a year of the Rabbit zodiac sign. Here is a duilian, a pair of lines of poetry, or actually a special form called chunlian, used as a New Year's decoration that expresses happy and hopeful thoughts for the coming year sent us by Joe Ye from Beijing: The meanings of these lines are: Top:... Read more →

Material Assets and FBX

Last year, we discussed analysing the FBX files exported by Revit to access the texture data UV coordinates and other material and rendering information. However, even something as simple as retrieving the material name from the FBX file is apparently no longer possible. This has led to several questions such as the following: Question: When using either the FBX SDK version 2010.2 or 2011.3.1, I can no longer read the material attached to an object from an FBX file exported... Read more →

Unit Conversion and New Blogs

Quite a while back, I published a unit conversion utility for Revit 2010. Let's take a fresh look at that, and also at a couple of new Revit blogs. We discussed a couple of other issues related to units since then, such as the unit suffix and ProjectUnit SDK sample and a look at voltage units. The latter also includes an overview of some other unit related posts. Anyway, Rod Howarth picked up on the unit converter utility and ported... Read more →

Automate DesignOption and 64 Bit Add-In Templates

Let's start off the week with another idea from Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He recently presented his results of exploring the Revit ribbon internals using UISpy, driving Revit using UI Automation, subscribing to UI Automation events, and switching between different projects and views. Here is another of his ideas of making use of UI Automation: This screen snapshot shows the design options dropdown list: When showing elements programmatically using the app.ActiveUIDocument.ShowElements( elementSet ) method, it might occur that... Read more →

Setting Duct Width and Height Requires Regeneration

Whenever you have a problem modifying or querying the model with your Revit plug-in, one of the first things to check is always your regeneration mode. If you are using the manual regeneration option, you need to check whether you possibly omitted a required intermediate regeneration call. It seems that there can never be enough reminders of this. Here is another case at hand: Question: I am sizing rectangular duct fittings through the API, and I noticed that the different... Read more →

Access to Shared Family Parameter GUID

Here is a question that came up several times. It also demonstrates a neat (if somewhat time consuming) use of Reflection to access a property that otherwise would be inaccessible. Here is the original question: Question: How can I reliably tell whether a parameter on a family document is a shared parameter, or is actually a family parameter? If it is a shared parameter, how can I retrieve its original GUID as it was when it was originally added to... Read more →

Type Filter Benchmark Update

We have come to trust the Revit 2011 API filters to really be the most performant approach to retrieve sets of database elements fulfilling a complex combination of criteria. To reinforce that message, here is another benchmark by Piotr Zurek, who says: While searching for some answers in your blog I have stumbled across an old post where Guy Robinson compared the performance of the Revit 2010 API class filter vs an anonymous method. I found the result really intriguing... Read more →

Happy New Year, Ribbon Spying and UI Automation

I hope you had a wonderful end of the last and beginning of the new year! Happy New Year to you all! I returned from the week of rest and was completely occupied with the backlog of ADN support cases in the past few days. Here is a really heavy-duty post to get us started again, and started with a bang! It revisits the never-ending and always popular issue of launching a Revit command programmatically, but this time based on... Read more →

VSTA to Stay and Updater to Go

As you may have heard from Kean, we have safely arrived in Munich, Germany for the next developer conference, the biggest one in our European series. Actually, he only talks about his own arrival, but our arrival worked all right as well. One topic that we are discussing at these conferences is cloud computing, so it was a funny coincidence to run into a nice big tangible cloud when we went out to have a dinner with our developer partners... Read more →

Filtered Element Collector Sample Overview

The developer conference in Paris went well, and Adam, Partha and I spent a nice day exploring Paris using their wonderful velib bicycle rental system. You pay just one euro for a one-day membership. It allows you to pick up and return a bicycle at any one of the city's hundreds of completely automated and networked rental points. If you return the bike within thirty minutes, it is free of charge. Beyond that time, it costs a euro or two... Read more →

Snow and Woe with Manifest Files

I am still on the road toward Paris. The departure of our flight in Moscow was delayed, so we missed the connection to Paris in Vienna. In addition, I heard that the Paris airport was closed all day until five in the afternoon due to snow. We are still booked to fly and arrive Thursday night, though, so the Paris conference scheduled for Friday is not yet endangered. Right now, the ETA is quarter to twelve, so it will be... Read more →

More Kevin Filtering Benchmarks

I caught a germ yesterday in Moscow, maybe travelling on the subway to the office, or at the developer conference itself. I suffered through the night with a pain in the bones of my face and a headache, and yet I was able to catch up on lots of sleep in the end, getting up much later than normal today. The whole morning has also been very unpleasant inside my head, but the rest of me feels fine, and it... Read more →

Дополнения для Ревит – Russian Add-ins for Revit

If you can read Russian, you may be interested in Arthur Kurakov's blog. Arthur presents several Revit add-ins useful for the Russian market, and some are certainly useful for other countries as well. Superfilter суперфильтр is better than the basic Revit filter: The standard Revit filter filters by element category, whereas Superfilter filters by family and type instead. It is easier to filter room tags, for instance. One is square and the other is the mark of this room. This... Read more →

Find Intersecting Elements

Right now I am sitting in the Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport, which very friendlily provides free public wifi Internet access, unlike the also very friendly staff with an unfortunately less generous wifi policy in the Sheraton hotel we stayed at, who (try to) charge USD 20 per day for the same service. Yesterday we looked at the XML family usage report from Kevin Vandecar's filtering and optimisation presentation at the AEC DevCamp conference in Boston in June, which formed... Read more →

XML Family Usage Report

I spent a pleasant weekend here in Tel Aviv, mostly preparing for the upcoming developer conferences. I did take time for a walk along the beach to Jaffa and an early dinner in a neat little restaurant in the port, Container. Here it is, behind the fishing boats, seen from the other side of the port, with old Jaffa in the background: I also found out that you can get really good coffee in Israel, and wonderful ice cream, for... Read more →

Pattern for Semi-Asynchronous Idling API Access

Here is another wonderful contribution from Daren Thomas: A Pattern for Asynchronously Updating Revit Documents. As an attentive reader of this blog, you will certainly remember one of my favourite and most powerful recent projects, the modeless loose connector navigator. It retrieves and displays a list of unconnected MEP connectors in a modeless dialogue box. Being modeless, the dialogue is not within the context of a Revit external command Execute method, nor any other Revit API call-back, and thus has... Read more →

Failure API Take Two

Before I get into today's topic, let me lament a bit about my Wednesday morning. Travel Woes I am flying to Las Vegas today in order to have time for last-minute AU preparations and acclimatise properly there. For reasons unknown to me, my travel agent (who shall remain unnamed here in public) booked me a flight leaving at seven in the morning from Switzerland to London, and a continuation from London to Las Vegas with an eight hour wait in... Read more →

Launching a Revit Command

One question that I frequently hear is how to launch a built-in Revit command programmatically. We recently discussed a specific case related to this issue in some depth, how to close the active document and especially pointed out why this is risky, undesirable and not supported. To close the active document, we used the SendKeys.SendWait method provided in the .NET framework System.Windows.Forms namespace. Many of the other attempts that I have seen in the past to launch a Revit command... Read more →

Autodesk University 2010 Class Materials

I submitted the materials for my three Autodesk University classes yesterday. I checked the enrollment numbers at the same time and was a bit surprised: CP228-2 Optimal Use of New Autodesk Revit 2011 Programming Features, on Revit 2011 API features in general and the Idling event in particular: 154. CP234-2 Exactly What You Want and Faster: Autodesk Revit 2011 Programming Optimization, on optimisation and benchmarking, especially filtering: 135. CP316-3U All Systems Go in Autodesk Revit MEP Programming, an 'Unconference' together... Read more →

Access Deleted Element

Here is a question posted by Kristian (Krispy5) Parsons, Systems Analyst - Design at Westfield Design & Construction Pty. Ltd. on accessing deleted element data in the DocumentChanged event handler: Question: How do I find the category of the deleted elements? When I try to get the Element from the ElementId it fails since the element has already been deleted. In my case I would like to warn users when they have deleted a floor. Answer: I was planning to... Read more →

Level Filter Benchmark

Yesterday I published Kevin Vandecar's handout document from his AEC DevCamp presentation on filtered element collectors, and right away an interesting case cropped up which motivated a closer look at one of his samples. By the way, many of his samples are very interesting to have a closer look at, which I plan to do soon as well. For now, let's start off with an analysis of the ElementLevelFilter, based on the following question: Question: A quick question this time:... Read more →

Filtered Element Collectors

One of the most important enhancements made in the Revit 2011 API which is guaranteed to affect almost every single conceivable Revit add-in is the new filtered element collector mechanism, and we have already looked at numerous aspects and examples of using it in various ways. It represents the one and only way to access elements in the Revit database, if you disregard a number of dedicated Document properties providing direct access to specialised collections of various types, which can... Read more →

MeasurePanelArea Update

Iffat Mai of Perkins + Will brought up an issue with the MeasurePanelArea Revit SDK sample, handled by Joe Ye: Question: As we reviewed the Massing > MeasurePanelArea SDK Sample, the following error message was displayed while trying to run it: It says: "Input type is of an element type that exists in the API, but not in Revit's native object model. Try using Autodesk.Revit.DB.FamilyInstance instead, and then post-processing the results to find the elements of interest." Answer: This is... Read more →

Model Review for Standards Compliance

We discussed Autodesk Revit Model Review when it was originally introduced as a subscription pack add-in for Revit 2010. In the last moments before leaving Cairo and my host Mohamed Yamani of Kemet Corporation yesterday, we discussed some of their further Revit application development ideas and customisation needs. One important item they mentioned was automated checking of building standards compliance. This can obviously be implemented using the Revit API, but of course we wish to avoid reinventing the wheel where... Read more →

Closing the Active Document and Why Not To

Here is a question raised and solved by René Gerlach of CIDEON Software GmbH in collaboration with Joe Ye, and an explanation by Arnošt Löbel explaining the associated dangers: Question: The documentation says that the overloads of the Document.Close method cannot close the active document. How can this be handled anyway? I really do want to programmatically close the active document. Answer: Revit does not currently expose any API to close the active document programmatically. I think an alternative possible... Read more →

Model Elements Revisited

Scott Conover responded with a wealth of ideas to yesterday's model element selection discussion, which in turn has gone through numerous previous iterations, so this really seems like an endless theme. Actually it is not even yesterday's, yet, it is still today's. We both wanted to fix it fast. Here are Scott's comments and suggestions: First, on the original solution: IList found = collector .WhereElementIsNotElementType() .WhereElementIsViewIndependent() .WherePasses( new LogicalOrFilter( new ElementIsElementTypeFilter( false ), new ElementIsElementTypeFilter( true ) ) ) .ToElements();... Read more →

Selecting Model Elements

We repeatedly looked at the selection of model elements, and in the discussion on material quantity extraction I mentioned the idea that one possible additional improvement might be to make use of the Category.HasMaterialQuantities property. The topic keeps returning, and now it arose again in a question from Konstanty Seniut. I have updated the answer after the initial posting to add some later notes by Scott Conover, so that they are not missed. To see Scott's notes and explanations in... Read more →

Subscription Release and Updated SDK

Lots of really important news coming in right now, both because the mid-year updates of the Revit family products are now available and because we just released the Revit 2011 DevTV recordings that we are so excited about. Similar to last year, Autodesk provides two types of mid-year updates to Revit: The Web Update 2 (WU2) that I recently discussed. The Subscription Release. Unlike the public web updates, the Revit 2011 subscription releases are available only for subscription customers. Updated... Read more →

Revit 2011 DevTV

The Revit DevTV recordings are probably the absolutely most efficient learning resource for quickly getting a hands-on experience of programming Revit. They include Overview of the SDK Installation of samples Creating your first add-in Iterating over database elements Selecting an element Extracting element parameter data ... And much more! The first version was created for Revit 2008, and that was reused for the Revit 2009 training material as well. Augusto Gonçalves of Autodesk Brazil created an updated version for Revit... Read more →

Revit 2011 Web Update 2

I am currently attending an Autodesk-specific non-technical training in a pretty posh old English manor house, The Elvetham. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth I planted an oak tree here which is still standing, and King Henry VIII met one of his wives here, back in the sixteenth century. In more recent news, a colleague just pointed out the Revit OpEd blog featuring a concise and clear overview of the newly released Revit 2011 web update 2, which is build 20100903_2115, and its... Read more →

Extract Part Atom Revisited

We briefly discussed the use of the ExtractPartAtomFromFamilyFile method in Revit 2010. Now the question on using this method arose again in the context of the Revit 2011 API: Question: I invoked the Autodesk.Revit.ApplicationServices.Application ExtractPartAtomFromFamilyFile method of on an RFA file, using the following code: private void createPartAtomFile( Application app, string rfaFilePath, string partAtomFilePath ) { app.ExtractPartAtomFromFamilyFile( rfaFilePath, partAtomFilePath ); } This threw an AccessViolationException with the following stack trace: AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is... Read more →

DoorSwing Fix

I am spending this week in the UK. We are having a long-awaited EMEA DevTech team meeting today. We finally succeeded in creating a possibility for all ADN engineers working in the European region to get together face to face. I met some of my colleagues for the first time, for instance Marat, who is based in Moscow, and Kristine from Toronto (not really part of Europe). The rest of the week I will be attending an internal training course,... Read more →

Filter for View and Phase

Here is yet another entry in our endlessly growing collection of filtering examples, highlighting yet another hitherto unexplored aspect, combining a view filter with a parameter filter for a specific phase. Question: I need to retrieve all elements in a specific view that have same phase, created but not demolished. How can I achieve that, please? Answer: To get all elements in a specified view, you can use the overload of the FilteredElementCollector constructor taking a view element id as... Read more →

AutoCAD 2010 DWG Export

Today is a public holiday in Neuchâtel, the jeûne fédéral or Federal Fast holiday. I will use that for a hike in the Swiss mountains, that I so sorely neglected and missed this summer. Meanwhile, here is a simple question on the AutoCAD file format version used for DWG export. Question: How can I set the AutoCAD 2010 version as the destination file format for DWG export? The ACADVersion enumeration only has options for 2000, 2004, and 2007. In the... Read more →

Access to Curtain Grid Panels

Here is some strange behaviour noted by Daren Thomas of the Professur für Gebäudetechnik, Institut für Hochbautechnik at the technical university ETH Zürich and author of the Revit Python shell which led to the discovery and quick fix of a problem in the curtain grid API. Since Daren also provides a workaround for the problem for immediate use, I think it worthwhile to note it here. Question: I just came by some strange behaviour in Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011: It... Read more →

Immutable PointLoad Force

Today we crossed the Kattegat from Læsø in Denmark to Rörö in Sweden, north of Göteborg, so we have finally arrived in the archipelago on the west coast of Sweden. As said, you can follow our exact route on the Pantagruel tracker. We spent more than 48 hours at sea when going from Norway to Denmark, with some very beautiful moments, among others the night watches with more stars than you can imagine. I saw four shooting stars the first... Read more →

Simulating a Ribbon Textbox Label

On Wednesday evening I arrived in Stavanger on the coast of Norway, found the sailship Pantagruel and met the crew that I will be spending the coming week with. Thursday we went on a hike rather than sailing, because we happened to be so close to the spectacular Preikestolen or Pulpit Stone over the Lysefjord. We took our boat over from Stavanger to Jørpeland by motor, since the wind was exactly opposite our direction, and then spent all afternoon hiking... Read more →