The Building Coder

AU Day Two

Kean pointed out a few of the things going on here at AU, many of which directly affect me well. It is so exciting to meet all these people here doing impressive things and with innovative empowering projects, and also simply wonderful to catch up with colleagues that I have so much close virtual interaction with and otherwise seldom get to see face to face. And lots and lots of enthusiastic blog readers! Thank you for all your appreciation and... Read more →

Pick a Point in 3D

Today is the second day of AU for me, the first 'real' day of the conference. I woke up at two in the morning, got back to sleep again eventually, but gave up at five and thus had plenty of time for a final private dress rehearsal for my lecture on the extensible storage API later today. I needed that, since it is a couple of weeks since I submitted the material and all but forgot what it is about... Read more →

AU Begins and Point Cloud Overview

Once again I left the desert and the climbing in Red Rock and entered the air conditioned world of conference land. This year I was pretty leisurely about climbing, although I did at least a few climbs every day. I slept well and long, hiked in to Red Rock from the highway, read a book in the desert sunshine, and finally met up with people in the late morning. A memorable experience on my birthday on Saturday was meeting another... Read more →

Project Structure Generator on Autodesk Labs

I arrived safely in Las Vegas after a 12:40 hour flight to Los Angeles, 3:30 hour wait, und another flight of 1:05 hours. Pretty crazy. I had a headache after that, but not too bad, and I slept well out in the desert. Just like in previous years (08, 09, 09b, 10), my daytime jetlag therapy consists of climbing in Red Rock, this time with Sergio Colombo again, whom I first met and climbed with in 2008. We did the... Read more →

My First Revit Plug-in in VB

Back in May, we published the wonderful new Revit API training tool, the self-paced My First Revit Plug-in guide, originally based on the C# programming language. Based on popular demand, we have now added new VB.NET samples. So regardless whether you are new to this training or have already gone through it once with the C# code, now is your chance to choose the language you prefer, C# or VB.Net, at www.autodesk.com/myfirstrevitplugin. The explanations in the lessons are still written... Read more →

Accessing Room Data

Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans! For me, Thursday November 24 is hopefully a happy travelling day, arriving in Las Vegas a few days in advance to acclimatize. Here is a nice little beginner's question that I decided to answer by implementing a new command in The Building Coder samples: Question: How can I access the room information in a Revit BIM? I would like to see a list of all rooms with their position, properties, and boundary polygon. Answer:... Read more →

AU Virtual and Collaborative Translation

Here are two noteworthy recent little news items on Registration for AU Virtual and the Collaborative translation of Homestyler. AU Virtual Registration has opened for Autodesk University Virtual with its live and on-demand classes. It is free for students and educators: The Autodesk student and educator community has free access to Autodesk University Virtual from November 29-30. AU Virtual provides an opportunity for engineers, architects and designers to discover the latest trends and technologies via an online event with live... 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 →

Access Central File TransmissionData on Revit Server

We already discussed using the TransmissionData class to list linked files and make changes using the WriteTransmissionData method. Here is another question on this topic answered by my colleague Joe Ye: Question: I want to access the TransmissionData object in a central file stored in the Revit Server. How can I achieve that via the Revit API, please? I tried the suggestions listed in the developer guide and none of them worked for me. I also tried using IsValidUserVisibleFullServerPath on... Read more →

Read-only Workset API

Another one of the new Revit 2012 API features that we still never had a detailed look at is the worksharing API, a comprehensive read-only API to worksharing features, access the list of worksets, find out what elements are in a workset, who borrowed what, whether an element went out of date with central, etc. Here is a quick Q & A on some basic aspects of that API: Question: I know that the built-in parameter ELEM_PARTITION_PARAM identifies the workset... Read more →

Revit Server REST API

I am currently in Paris giving a Revit API training, last thing before taking off for Autodesk University end of next week. Meanwhile, one little item which just dropped into my mailbox is the call to vote on the AUGI wish list: AUGI Wish List AUGI, the Autodesk User Group International, needs you to choose your top ten wish list items to help define the final Top Ten to be presented to Autodesk during the AUGI Annual Meeting. You can... Read more →

Revit API Developer Guide on Autodesk WikiHelp

Step by step, online help is ever more prevalent. A huge step forwarded was achieved with the Revit 2012 product WikiHelp system with its support for community building and contribution, and the Revit API documentation soon followed suit. The Content Wrangler recently published an interesting article and interview discussing the topic in more depth. Following up on this, here is some more detailed information and suggestions specifically targeted at the Revit API help by Mikako Harada, ADN AEC Technical Lead:... Read more →

Set Family Parameter Requires Type

I was running down to town to have tea with my friend Otto on Saturday morning, and happened to see this autumn leaf lying on the ground. Turned back, picked it up, and made a picture of it in the sunshine on Otto's veranda. It is completely unretouched, I promise! Back to the Revit API, here is a short note on another issue run into by Ishwar Nagwani, Technical Consultant in our Bangalore organisation, who recently contributed the pick points... Read more →

Editing a Group Take Two

I am publishing this now, on November 11, 2011, at 11:11 my time, to celebrate this unique and yet completely arbitrary time and date in our calendar history. I hope you appreciate it and celebrated that moment in your own way as well :-) I discussed various aspects of programmatically handling Revit element groups in the past, such as how to create, rename, edit and delete them. In a comment on the discussion on editing groups, YarUnderoaker asked for further... Read more →

Undocumented ElementId Relationships

I recently looked at determining the coordinates of a filled region by looking at the sketch related to it, which we can identify by using an unsupported feature of the current Revit implementation, the generation of consecutive element ids for related elements. Rudolf Honke of Mensch und Maschine acadGraph GmbH pointed out that this approach can be used to determine other relationships as well, and brought up a whole bunch of ideas related to this topic. He says: The sketch... Read more →

Pick Corners and Create Floor

I presented an example demonstrating floor creation and pointed out that setting a view using the ActiveView property cannot be achieved within a transaction. Ishwar Nagwani, Technical Consultant in our Bangalore organisation, contributed a sample command to create a new a floor which demonstrates both of these aspects in conjunction with the interactive PickBox method to determine the floor corners. It makes use of the FindElement method, which we have seen in various incarnations to select an element of a... Read more →

Planar Face Transform

Here is another contribution by Joe Offord of Enclos, who already shared valuable insights on accessing curtain wall geometry, speeding up the interactive selection process, mirroring in a new family and changing the active view. Above all, he implements all his stuff in VB, so this is also something for you VB aficionados. This time, Joe looks at a command that redraws a planar face's edges in a drafting view. The issue is somewhat related to the discussion of polygon... Read more →

Lock the Model, e.g. Prevent Deletion

I recently discussed two common and interesting issues with developers which ended up being easily resolved: Locking the state of certain programmatically generated parts of the model to prevent the user from messing them up. Simpler still, prevent deletion of certain elements. Both of these issues can be efficiently addressed using the Failure API. It allows us to Define our own failure conditions. Post pre-defined or custom failures. Handle failures, e.g. suppress unwanted messages or completely replace the standard failure... Read more →

Loading an Add-in With a Journal File

I touched upon journal files a couple of times in the past, for example to load an external application and automatically perform an action in the DocumentOpened event handler, or to implement a script automating IFC import. The Revit SDK also includes the Journaling sample which demonstrates how an add-in can define what information goes into the journal file while it is being recorded, and how to use that data to repeat the add-in's external command functionality during replay. However,... Read more →