The Building Coder: Built-in Parameter Name and LabelUtils

August 08, 2011

Built-in Parameter Name and LabelUtils

Over a year ago, I mentioned the LabelUtils class introduced in the Revit 2011 API. Here is another question that came up and shows that it might be useful to point it out again:

Question: I need access to the definition of an internal (built-in) parameter, because I want to retrieve its name via Autodesk.Revit.DB.Definition.Name. I know there's an overload of the Element.Parameter property which takes a BuiltInParameter argument. The problem is that there is no element available at the time when I need to obtain the parameter name. So I am looking for something similar to Document.Settings.Categories which allows global access to built-in categories. I've tried to find something similar via Document.ParameterBindings, but this map seems to contain only external definitions, i.e. definitions of shared parameters, not of built-in ones.

Answer: Is this what you are after?

  string s = string.Empty;
 
  foreach( BuiltInParameter bip in 
    Enum.GetValues( typeof( BuiltInParameter ) ) )
  {
    s += "\r\n" + bip.ToString();
  }
  TaskDialog.Show( "Parameter Names", s );

It retrieves the string values of all the built-in parameter enumeration values.

Reponse: No, I do not want to use the BuiltInParameter.ToString method, since the string is presented to the user. Therefore, I would like to use the Parameter.Definition.Name instead, which is user friendlier and also localized.

To access the definition name, I would need to have an element with all the parameters I am interested in attached to it. If I had such an element 'e', I could use the following code to create a mapping from built-in parameters to the corresponding user visible names:

  Element e;
 
  Dictionary<BuiltInParameter, string> mapBipToName 
    = new Dictionary<BuiltInParameter, string>();
 
  foreach( BuiltInParameter bip in
    Enum.GetValues( typeof( BuiltInParameter ) ) )
  {
    // translate built-in enum to parameter name
 
    Parameter p = e.get_Parameter( bip );
 
    if( null != p )
    {
      mapBipToName.Add( bip, p.Definition.Name );
    }
  }