The Building Coder

GetInstanceGeometry Overhead and Invalid References

I made it back safe and sound to Switzerland from the developer conferences, and I note that this special pivotal day – the winter solstice – seems to be progressing normally and we all survived in spite of the end of an era in the Maya calendar. Thus we can continue growing our understanding of the Revit API, as well as attending to other important business here on our lovely planet. The GeometryInstance GetInstanceGeometry method returns the geometry of a... Read more →

Solid Centroid and Volume Calculation

I have not posted anything since last Friday, being too caught up in the West European Developer days and travelling. Today and tomorrow we spend in Gothenburg on the last lap of our journey, after Paris, Milano, Farnborough and Munich. I had a nap in the taxis to and from the airport yesterday, both in Germany and Sweden, so I was able to burn some midnight oil to share the following exploration with you. One of the many interesting conversations... Read more →

Installing a Macro and Closing the Active Document

You can close an open Revit document programmatically. Unfortunately, though, this only works for all except the last one. People keep running into this issue, of course. It even motivated René Gerlach to implement a workaround using SendKeys.SendWait to send an Alt-F4 keystroke to Revit to close the active window, and Arnošt Löbel to warn gravely against its use and even publish a Windows message workaround disclaimer. Well, happily, such an adventurous workaround is not at all required. Another workaround... Read more →

ToElementIds Performance

Conversion of a filtered element collector to an explicit .NET collection of elements or element ids is always costly and mostly avoidable and unnecessary. Before getting to the details of that issue, here is another quick snapshot from our travels to the West European developer conferences. As you either know or might guess, one of the main topics of these is cloud and mobile development, e.g. looking at topics such as the BIM 360 Glue REST API and SDK and... Read more →

Accessing all Elements in a Schedule

Here is a quick little post, with a surprisingly short and simple answer to a short and seemingly difficult Revit API question. Before getting to that, I will just mention that I arrived safe and sound in Paris for a developer conference here. I had a walk in the sunset on the north bank of the Seine from the Gare de Lyon along the industrial areas on Quai de Bercy and crossed the river over the new-built Pont National to... Read more →

BIM 360 Glue REST API Authentication Using Python

I provided an overview of the BIM 360 Glue REST API and SDK last Friday and hinted at upcoming further exploration. Well, here it is already. Due to Autodesk University and the world-wide developer conferences, I had to skip my last education day, but this stuff was too exciting to wait any longer :-) So, unwilling to go for any length of time without trying out something new, I played a bit with the Glue API anyway. For fun, I... Read more →

The BIM 360 Glue Viewer and REST API

As you certainly know by now, Autodesk provides a range of powerful cloud-based solutions, specifically Autodesk 360, PLM 360 and BIM 360 Glue (reference). Of special interest to AEC developers, the BIM 360 Glue platform includes support for programming interfaces and a software development kit, the BIM 360 Glue SDK, providing a set of tools for developers to interface with it. The programming support consists of two distinct components: Display component: embeddable 3D viewer to provide visual access to models... Read more →

Reload Add-in for Debug Without Restart

We explored and learned a lot of interesting areas during the DevLab at AU on Tuesday last week. One recurring theme is how to effectively debug an add-in without having to restart Revit and reload the entire model each time a change is made to the source code. A long, long time back, right in the beginning of the Revit .NET API, it was briefly possible to use the Visual Studio Edit and Continue feature for that. That was obviously... Read more →

Boost Your BIM and Dance with an Elephant

Advent, advent! Yet another Revit API focused blog is born! Harry Mattison, ex Revit API development team, has initiated Boost Your BIM and kicked it off with a series on using the built-in SharpDevelop development environment Revit macros to resolve duplicate tags: Finding elements Finding only family instances Get & set parameter values Transactions and wrapping up Thank you, Harry, and the best of luck to you and your new blog! Dances with Elephants Also, for a more high-level strategic... Read more →

Extra Transaction or Regeneration Required

Whenever your add-in modifies the model in any way and you wish to query the Revit database, you need to pay careful attention to ensure that you do not retrieve stale or invalid data. If anything unexpected whatsoever happens, one of the first things to consider is the possible need for a document regeneration or additional separate transactions between steps. These kinds of issues arise frequently. I discussed adding an extra transaction to modify beam parameters and add openings to... Read more →