The Building Coder

Transactions, Sub-Transactions and Transaction Groups

Here is a recent query from a developer that led to a nice succinct overview of transactions, sub-transactions and transaction groups by Arnošt Löbel. This makes a change from the recent rash of monster posts. The last ten posts were all rather overwhelming in size, and hopefully impressive in content as well. From Aril 16 until 29, I posted a total of 26228 words, 245504 bytes. So let's keep this one short, sweet and to the point. Question: When should... Read more →

What's New in the Revit 2014 API

Here is one post that I prepared well for in advance, by publishing the previous 'What's New in the API' sections two months back: What's New in the Revit 2010 API What's New in the Revit 2011 API What's New in the Revit 2012 API What's New in the Revit 2013 API The information provided here is extracted from the document 'Revit Platform API Changes and Additions.docx' provided with the Revit SDK. It is also included in the 'What's New'... Read more →

Compiling the Revit 2014 SDK

Here are some notes on the small issues I encountered compiling the Revit 2014 SDK: Compile and install RevitLookup Set up the Revit API assembly paths First compilation run causes expected errors Set up the RevitAddInUtility assembly path PointCurveCreation Office reference CancelSave RevitAddInUtility Reference Set up the RvtSamples application Fix errors in RvtSamples.txt Download RvtSamples and RevitLookup I already described this same process during the Revit 2013 timeframe. Let's see if anything changed, or, better still, improved. Compile and Install... Read more →

Room and Furniture Loops Using Symbols

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I now implemented the first of the next steps mentioned at the end: Separation of symbol and instance data in my add-in and database structure: currently, the furniture loops are placed absolutely, and multiple instances of a symbol duplicate the same loop over and over again at different locations. I will rewrite this to separate the furniture loop definition, defined by the family symbol, and its... Read more →

Migrating a Built-in Category and Other Things

Here is a category related issue that appeared when migrating from the Revit 2013 to the Revit 2014 API, plus a several other typical simple little Revit API questions from the last day or two: Migrating the room separation lines built-in category Storage of RGB colour values for materials Updating a DXF link Retrieving truss family elements Retrieving stair stringer data Storing custom data Migrating the Room Separation Lines Built-in Category Question: I get the following error while migrating my... Read more →

Accessing and Filtering by Ramp Material

I had a chat with Ning Zhou, who was away from the Revit API for a while and is now happily back in the fold. He explored how to access the material of a ramp element. Access to Ramp Material Question: Is there a way to get the ramp material information using API? I tried lots of paths and could not find anything. Answer (by Ning himself): I searched again using RevitLookup snoop. It turns out that basic material info... Read more →

Grouping Schedule Headers and How to Do Something

Here is my first real Revit 2014 post, sharing some code friendlily provided by David Robison of Design Master showing how to use the ViewSchedule.GroupHeaders method. Using the ViewSchedule GroupHeaders Method Question: I am trying to call ViewSchedule.GroupHeaders, and it keeps throwing an unhandled argument exception saying "Headers could not be grouped. Parameter name: right". Answer: Yes, this issue has been raised in the past and a few solutions were suggested. First case The ViewSchedule.GroupHeaders produces the argument exception mentioned... Read more →

Room Editor Project Overview and CouchDB Configuration

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, here are some issues I tackled since my last report: Project Overview Replicating a CouchDB with Python Same origin policy snag and resolution Learning and struggling with CouchApps Relief moving to Kanso Next steps Project Overview To recapitulate, the grand plan is to grab a 2D floor plan with furniture and equipment layout from the BIM, upload it to the cloud, and make it accessible for... Read more →

Migrating The Building Coder Samples to Revit 2014

I started migrating The Building Coder samples to Revit 2014. Funnily enough, on the exact same date as last year for the previous version. The changes are very small this time around. Furthermore, I am well prepared, since I recently intentionally eliminated all compiler warnings and deprecated calls compiling the code for Revit 2013. First, however, a picture or three from my ski tour last weekend over Il Chapütschin (3386 m) and La Sella (3584 m) in the Swiss Engadin.... Read more →

Perpetual GUID Algorithm and Revit 2014 Product GUIDs

Every year anew, people ask for the Revit product GUIDs used to identify the Revit installation and stored in the Windows registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall I already answered several queries from developers lately wishing to update their installers for the new version. I discussed this topic on a yearly basis in the past for Revit 2010 and previous versions, Revit 2011, Revit 2012, when the 'perpetual GUID algorithm' was introduced, and Revit 2013. The install path is less of an issue... Read more →

Changing a Family Parameter from Type to Instance

Here is a short and simple question that just cropped up and required some digging around until my colleague Phil Xia came up with the right answer: Question: Is it possible to change the type of a family parameter programmatically? This is possible in the family editor. I only see the IsInstance property, though, and it is read-only. I could achieve the same effect by deleting the parameter and creating a new one. Obviously that would require updating all the... Read more →

Launching AutoCAD within a Revit Add-in

We looked at the topic of running AutoCAD inside a Revit add-in way back in 2008, in the grey and dusty beginnings of this blog. Many developers have made use of that since then, and the topic is still important for all those who have significant functionality running inside an AutoCAD application and wish to make use of or enhance it by connecting it with their Revit add-in. Therefore, it is about time to dig that out and have a... Read more →

Desktop to Cloud via DreamSeat CouchDB Client

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I now started looking at storing the plan view room and furniture boundary loop data in the cloud. I wound up the main Revit add-in functionality using the ExtrusionAnalyzer to create a plan view boundary profile for the furniture and equipment family instances, sort and orient its output curves, determine their bounding box and visualise the results in a dynamically generated GeoSnoop .NET form for verification.... Read more →

Setting up your ViewOrientation3D

Here is a contribution from Mario Guttman of CASE, who already made various contributions here in the past. He says: I have been purging my 2013 code of deprecated functions in preparation for my 2014 upgrade. One group of statements I have needed to replace are the view creations. They were previously using the Document.Create.NewView3D method and needed converting to the View3D.CreateIsometric with a separate ViewOrientation3D object defining the view direction. Typically, in these kind of cases, I just search... Read more →

Handy Utility Classes

Rudolf Honke of Mensch und Maschine acadGraph GmbH has repeatedly encouraged me to raise awareness of the numerous utility classes available in the Revit API and now provided the following starting point for a discussion of them. One way to find a number of utility classes is to search the Revit API help file RevitAPI.chm for the string "utils": In general, these classes provide static methods that can be called from any valid context with no need for an object... Read more →

GeoSnoop .NET Boundary Curve Loop Visualisation

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I explained how I use the ExtrusionAnalyzer to create a plan view boundary profile for the furniture and equipment family instances, sort and orient its output curves, and determine their bounding box for visualisation. Today let's look at a simple loop visualisation implementation in a dynamically generated .NET form. The components of interest are: Point2dInt – an integer-based 2D point JtLoop – a closed polygon boundary... Read more →

Getting Started with the Revit API

I am regularly forced to return to this topic, to provide a useful starting point for beginners. The amount of available material is getting huge, and some help is required deciding where to start exploring the Revit API. The most important thing to be aware of is the Revit Developer Center. Start there by looking at the three DevTV video introductions and then work through the My First Revit Plug-in tutorial. In these tutorials, you are shown how to locate,... Read more →

Curve Following Face and Bounding Box Implementation

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I looked at using the ExtrusionAnalyzer to create a plan view boundary profile for the furniture and equipment family instances and implemented a utility method SortCurvesContiguous to sort and re-orient the curves it returns into a closed contiguous loop. An alternative and more effective method is to use the Edge AsCurveFollowingFace call instead of AsCurve, as we shall see below. In any case, we want to... Read more →

Extrusion Analyser and Plan View Boundaries

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I looked at using the ExtrusionAnalyzer to create a plan view boundary profile for the furniture and equipment family instances and implemented a utility method SortCurvesContiguous to sort and re-orient the curves it returns into a closed contiguous loop. I did not yet display the code driving the extrusion analyser, though, or discuss my experiences with that. Those are the topics of today's post: Using the... Read more →

The Revit 2014 Pre-release API and SDK

Below, we look at how ADN members can obtain the Revit 2014 pre-release SDK, address migration issues, and one or two interesting new aspects of the API. First however, a few words on yesterdays post touting the idea of a cloud-based restaurant seating arrangement and cleaning application. As you probably noticed, the main new ideas I discussed there were in honour of April fool's Day. Many of my colleagues joined in with other similar hoax blog posts. Stephen Preston presents... Read more →

Cloud-Based Restaurant Seating and Cleaning

I hope you had a successful Easter egg hunt. As you probably noticed, I have lately been focusing on the research and implementation of my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project for the upcoming Autodesk internal tech summit in June as much as my day-to-day tasks will allow. Current Project Overview To recap, the basic idea is simple: implement an example of round-trip minimal simple editing of a 2D rendering of a Revit model on any mobile device with... Read more →