The Building Coder

What's New in the Revit 2012 API

This is the third 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 the Revit 2012 API, looking at: Major renovations Major enhancements Small enhancements and changes First, however, another update on my vacation. Unexpected Places, and... 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 →

What's New in the Revit 2010 API

I am in vacation in Italy, and trying not to work. There is one project that I had in mind for quite a while, though, and will start addressing now anyway during this break: I plan to publish the contents of the Revit API documentation 'What's New' sections from the previous few releases of the Revit API help file RevitAPI.chm here, so that they become included in future Internet searches. The reason for this is that I have found them... Read more →

ADN Revit API Training Material Update and Vacation

After cleaning up the usage of deprecated Revit API calls in The Building Coder samples, I decided to clean up the ADN training material as well. My original plan was to remove all warnings about deprecated API usage, only I quickly discovered there were none to remove :-) In the MEP sample application AdnRme, I just updated the year listed in the copyright message to 2013 and produced AdnRme version 2013.0.2.0. I then did the same for the ADN Revit... Read more →

Retrieving Schedules on a Sheet

Guy Robinson recently explained an easy way to access all elements in a schedule. Victor Chekalin picked up and expanded on that. Here is his solution to retrieve all schedules in a view and elements from a schedule. In his own words: One wonderful day I had to retrieve schedules which are presented on a sheet: At first I looked at the Revit API Help but unfortunately there is no method such as GetSchdulesOnView in the ViewSheet class. There is... Read more →

Eliminating Compiler Warnings and Deprecated Calls

I am revisiting this topic again, which we last looked at a year ago, to clean up our usage of deprecated methods in the Revit 2012 API. In that discussion, I also pointed back to previous versions and other related issues. Here are the warnings about obsolete usage currently produced when compiling The Building Coder samples version 2013.0.100.1 against the Revit 2013 API – copy to a text editor or view source to see the truncated lines in full: C:\bc\BuildingCoder\BuildingCoder\CmdTransformedCoords.cs(67,41):... Read more →

Adjustable Versus Perpendicular Spud

I recently presented an explanation of some Revit MEP family editor part type classes, which led to a follow-up: Question: Thank you for the detailed answer about the duct fittings. I have a similar problem with one of the pipe fittings, namely spud. I know what a spud is, but not the difference between an adjustable and a perpendicular one. Can you explain the actual difference, please? Here is an image with some different spuds that I collected: Answer: Spuds... Read more →

2D SVG Editing on Mobile Device with Raphaël

As I mentioned last week, I took another look at displaying a 2D view of a Revit model on mobile devices using SVG to enhance the room polygon and furniture picker in SVG. That implementation displays a read-only view of the model, useful for picking and identifying elements, e.g. for querying or adding metadata to them. It would also be nice to be able to edit some data graphically, e.g. enable translation and rotation of the furniture and other family... Read more →

MP3 Manipulation Using Python, Mutagen and Ffmpeg

Today is an education day, and I am taking another look at displaying a 2D view of a Revit model on mobile devices using SVG. I started off doing so quite a while back, implementing a room polygon and furniture picker in SVG. That implementation displays a read-only view of the model, useful for picking and identifying elements, e.g. for querying or adding metadata to them. Today I plan to go one step further, though, and enable translation and rotation... Read more →

Adding a Button to Existing Ribbon Panel

Here is an interesting user interface contribution from Eduardo Teixeira of Autodesk: Question: I am building a Revit add-in using the Revit API. I would like to add a button for it to an existing out-of-the-box Revit ribbon panel using the Revit API in C#. I could not find any documentation that shows how to do that. Is it possible at all? Answer: Yes, this can be done. I am not certain whether it is officially supported, though. You will... Read more →

Simple MEP System Traversal

Here is a simple MEP system traversal implementation that especially addresses the issue of determining what equipment is connected to the systems. The following read-only external command traverses all MEP systems in the document, using the MEPSystem.Elements property to retrieve most of the desired elements with very little effort. More than half the code is actually fussing about with formatting the result: [Transaction( TransactionMode.ReadOnly )] public class Command : IExternalCommand { static string PluralSuffix( int n ) { return 1... Read more →

Content Localisation

How to manage families and content creation is a crucial topic for a large number of Revit add-ins. Brian Johnson, technical specialist on structural engineering solutions at Autodesk in Austin, Texas, discusses how to efficiently address some important aspects of this below. First, however, let me wish everybody a Happy New Year of the Snake! A year for reflection, planning and searching answers. A good time for shrewd dealings, political affairs and coups d'état. People will be more likely to... Read more →

Parameters versus Properties

In his comment on reading material asset data, Alexander Buschmann points out that this same information can be accessed without retrieving, reading and converting the data directly from the undocumented built-in parameters. Instead and more comfortably, you can use the following official properties on the appropriate classes: Material material = null; foreach( Material mat in e.Materials ) { material = mat; break; } PropertySetElement pse = doc.GetElement( material.StructuralAssetId ) as PropertySetElement; StructuralAsset asset = pse.GetStructuralAsset(); double a = asset.WoodBendingStrength; double... Read more →