The Building Coder

Sort and Orient Curves to Form a Contiguous Loop

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I need to determine the boundary loop polygons to represent the furniture and equipment family instances for manipulation on the mobile device. To display a polygon using SVG in the mobile device browser, I obviously need a set of contiguous and sorted curve elements forming a closed loop. I mentioned using the Revit API ExtrusionAnalyzer class to determine the plan view boundary outline for the family... Read more →

Filter for Family Instances in a Room

I wish you a Good Friday. Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I need to determine the boundary loop polygons to represent the furniture and equipment family instances for manipulation on the mobile device. Before I can start extracting their geometry, I need to access the objects themselves, i.e. determine which family instances are contained in the selected room. As always, we use a filtered element collector to access the Revit database... Read more →

Revit 2014 API and Plan View Room Boundary Loops

I am continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project. At the same time, Revit 2014 has been announced, and I am sure you are eager to hear more about that, especially from the API point of view, so let's have a look at that first. The Revit 2014 API It is impossible to cover everything, and I have to start somewhere. Here are a couple of highlights: API access to the project browser... Read more →

Revit 2014 and Supporting Columns

Revit 2014 Announced As you probably noticed by now, Revit 2014 has been announced. Here are the main product features: Design Enhanced Autodesk Exchange Dockable window framework New stairs and railings Temporary view templates to change view properties temporarily Point cloud improvements improve appearance and controls of point clouds Parameter variance for groups to vary the value of parameters assigned to groups New air terminal on duct enables placement of air terminal device on duct face New angle constraints to... Read more →

Relax – Simple Free Cloud Based Data Repository with NoSQL, CouchDB, and IrisCouch

Last week, I mentioned my proposal for the Autodesk Technical Summit in June, to present a cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project. That will obviously required a cloud-based data repository. Talking with my colleagues, all of their suggestions were oriented towards the Microsoft Azure and Amazon solutions discussed so far on the cloud and mobile DevBlog. I was searching for something freer, more open source, and less proprietary, and was rather surprised to discover an utterly relaxing solution that... Read more →

Rename View by Matching Elevation Tag with Room

Today is the last morning meeting with my European DevTech colleagues here in Brittany, and time to travel back to Switzerland. Before leaving, here is a useful real-world productivity tool by Trevor Taylor of ZGF, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects LLP, with his own description of the task and its solution: The task I want to address is to match interior elevation tags with the rooms they fall inside. This is used to track back and rename the corresponding views. Naming... Read more →

Cloud & Mobile, Extensible Storage Data Use in Schedules

My topics for today are: Cloud and mobile topics I covered so far Cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing on any mobile device using SVG Extensible storage data use in schedules I am still meeting with my European DevTech colleagues here in Konk Leon, 'anse du Lèon', the cove of the lion, aka Le Conquet, Brittany. Yesterday, one of our topics was work we have done so far for cloud and mobile applications. It was very interesting to hear about... Read more →

Parameter DisplayUnitType, Bretagne and Decompilers

After looking at several performance enhancement possibilities last week, e.g. the sweep family performance enhancement and LoadFamily and collector iteration performance, here is another exciting and pretty sophisticated exploration of internal Revit API implementation details by Victor Chekalin that can be used to achieve a significant speed improvement when accessing large numbers of parameters and checking their DisplayUnitType property. Brittany Before getting to that, though, here is an update on my current whereabouts. Yesterday I spent travelling to Brest and... Read more →

Determining Purgeable Elements

A question that crops up from time to time and is rather hard to answer exactly and exhaustively is on purgeable elements: Question: What is the best way to get all of the elements that can be purged? I can use WhereElementIsElementType filter to return all types, and WhereElementISNotElementType to return instances, but comparing the two lists does not leave me with the purgeable result. I could compare individual lists of types (i.e. family symbol and family instance), but that... Read more →

Units and RevitLookup

Here is a typical question from a Revit API newbie that prompts me to reiterate some important basic beginner information on units and the RevitLookup tool for exploring the Revit database: Question: How can I retrieve the length and mass units from a Revit document? Answer: The internal Revit database length unit is always imperial feet. That cannot be changed, so there is you answer for that. Similarly, the internal database unit for weight is kg, as far as I... Read more →

LoadFamily and Collector Iteration Performance

Since we are into the topic of family loading performance anyway, after yesterdays discussion on efficient sweep creation, here is another interesting discussion with some useful family loading and symbol filtering benchmarking results and observations by Thomas Jarzyna and an in-depth analysis of the effects of converting a filtered element collector to a .NET collection by Scott Conover: Question: I need to load some family symbols into my project. I have a lot of different families and even more symbols,... Read more →

Sweep Family Performance Enhancement

Now I am back at work again, enjoying the queries coming in from developers, postponing other important things such as my own long-term class and presentation preparations etc. Addicted to helping, that's me. Anyway, here is a piece of doubly good news, in that the developers mentioned below did a good job of helping themselves, in addition to achieving a radical speed improvement from 40 hours down to 3 minutes, i.e. just 0.125% of the original time, to programmatically generate... Read more →

Export Wall Parts Individually to DXF

I am back from my vacation. It was a wonderful break, and I feel ready and happy to get back to grips with everyday life and work again. A query from a colleague caught up with me already on the way back, on exporting a whole bunch of selected wall panel parts to individual DXF files. That gave me something nice and interesting to fiddle with during the nightly train ride up from Napoli to Milano and led to the... Read more →

Curve Evaluation and Song of the Gulls

Below, we take a look at one aspect of parametric NURB spline curve evaluation and an overview of recent AEC DevBlog posts. First, however, another update on my vacation :-) Marvels of the Song of the Gulls I am winding up my vacation on the Island of Ischia that I first discovered three years back. It is one of my favourite places in the world, where I visited natural wonders such as hot thermal springs of Sorgeto in Panza, where... Read more →

What's New in the Revit 2013 API

This is the fourth and last 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 2013 API, looking at: Major changes and renovations Major enhancements Small enhancements & API interface changes First, however, another update... Read more →