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 some elements cannot be shown because their design option is currently invisible.

The current design option visibility is defined per document and affects all views.

UI Automation could be used to set the current design option to the selected element's one, so it can be made visible.

So, if you want to show a given element, you can compare its design option with the current one before showing it.

Of course this is only possible if all elements in the element set passed in the ShowElements have the same design option.

If you just want to show a single element, this will never be a problem.

Yet again, many thanks to Rudolf for his many ideas and these valuable pointers!

64-bit Visual Studio DevTV Revit Add-in Template

Stephen LeCompte posted a comment on the DevTV add-in templates which integrate with the Visual Studio new project wizard to automatically set up a new Visual Studio project for a Revit add-in complete with skeleton external application, external command, and add-in manifest code. By the way, there is also a streamlined and updated C# version for my personal use with comments removed and other tweaks.

Stephen worked on making use of the templates on a 64 bit system and ran into some problems which were finally resolved:

OK, I did eventually find a solution to my problem where I do not have 32-bit Revit version installed but only 64-bit Revit.

After downloading the winzip file above...

1. extract the contents
2. within the .csproj file...
   1. do a find/replace on $(ProgramFiles) and replace with C:\Program Files
   2. find any instances where processorArchitecture=x86 and replace with processorArchitecture=x64
3. delete the old winzip file
4. create a new .zip that combines all the files completed.

The initial problem was trivial, forgetting to delete the original winzip even though the appropriate changes were made.

Here are Stephen's 64 bit templates:

• Template64BitOnlyRevitArchAddInCs.zip
• Template64BitOnlyRevitArchAddInVb.zip

They have been set up so that if you download the first templates and they do not work, you can still simply download this second version without deleting the old ones and see the new ones clearly as Revit Architecture 2011 64-bit only Addin.

Many thanks to Stephen for solving the issue and sharing his files with us!

Comments

[Sandeep]

Hi Jeremy,
Thanks you very much for 64-bit templates. I was waiting for this.. :)

Thanks
Sandeep

[Jeremy Tammik]

Dear Sandeep,

It is a pleasure! Thank you for your appreciation, and congratulations on your patience!

Cheers, Jeremy.

[NeilS]

Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for this, it has been very useful.

As an addition, you don't necessarily need to hard code 'C:\program files', you can use the system variable $(ProgramW6432) to make it a bit more flexible.

Thanks,

Neil

[Jeremy Tammik]

Dear Neil,

Thank you very much for the suggestion. As we discussed by private email, this only works on a 64 bit OS, and not on 32 bits.

I tried updating and testing on 32 bits and found out the hard way.

As you say yourself:

"It improves flexibility just a little bit, in as much as if a user has moved there program files folder, or possibly is using a non-English copy of windows then their program files will not necessarily be in 'C:\Program files', so using this variable takes care of that.

You are correct that this variable is only available on 64 bit systems, and then, only from within a 32 bit program it seems. Very annoying. So unfortunately it doesn't help with having a single template for both 32 and 64 bit systems.

The whole way that Microsoft went about the 64 bit OS seems very odd, but we have to live with it how it is."

Thank you!

Cheers, Jeremy.

[sangsen]

Hello Jeremy,
Parameters which are created(through API)during document creation is removed when we undo that document.How can we prevent it from undo operation?

Thanks,

[Jeremy Tammik]

Dear Sangsen,

As far as I know you cannot prevent an undo operation, nor exclude any specific operation from being undone.

Cheers, Jeremy.