Document Version, GUID and Number of Saves

Alexander Buschmann of the IDAT Ingenieurbüro für Datenverarbeitung in der Technik GmbH added a new comment to the interesting discussion on detecting family modification:

I'm a little bit late, but still:

Since Revit2015 there is a class 'DocumentVersion' – it provides a GUID and the number of saves of the document.

Together, this information should make it possible to identify changes to a document.

Store the data in a read-only parameter, and you should be set, without the need to implement a custom checksum thing.

The DocumentVersion can be obtained by calling BasicFileInfo.GetDocumentVersion.

I have not tried it, but it looks promising.

Please refer to the original discussion thread to see the other interesting suggestions provided to detect family modification.

CmdDocumentVersion

Based on Alexander's suggestion, I implemented this new short and sweet read-only external command CmdDocumentVersion in The Building Coder samples:

  [Transaction( TransactionMode.ReadOnly )]
  class CmdDocumentVersion : IExternalCommand
  {
    public Result Execute(
      ExternalCommandData revit,
      ref string message,
      ElementSet elements )
    {
      UIApplication uiapp = revit.Application;
      UIDocument uidoc = uiapp.ActiveUIDocument;
      Document doc = uidoc.Document;
 
      string path = doc.PathName;
 
      BasicFileInfo info = BasicFileInfo.Extract(
        path );
 
      DocumentVersion v = info.GetDocumentVersion();
 
      int n = v.NumberOfSaves;
 
      Util.InfoMsg( string.Format(
        "Document '{0}' has GUID {1} and {2} save{3}.",
        path, v.VersionGUID, n,
        Util.PluralSuffix( n ) ) );
 
      return Result.Succeeded;
    }
  }

Running it on my trusty old HVAC sample project that I have been maintaining ever since Revit 2008 produces the following result:

  Document 'Z:\a\rvt\hvac_project_2015.rvt' has GUID
  6359c822-15f3-44c3-83c5-f9bc258a3f90 and 338 saves.

This information is presented in a dialogue box like this:

By the way, another noteworthy aspect of this command is that it proves that the basic file info can be read successfully from a currently open document.

Thank you very much, Alexander, for this important hint!

Other Enhancements and Viewing Diffs in GitHub

I implemented a couple of other minor enhancements in The Building Coder samples that have not been explicitly pointed out here yet, e.g. a small check for the angle to true north (release 2015.0.110.3) to answer Frank Halliday's comment and starting work on removing all obsolete API usage.

So far, in release 2015.0.110.2, I reduced the warning count from 71 to 67.

The changes made for that can be seen by navigating to release 2015.0.110.1 and clicking on the label saying N commits.

After that, you can edit the exact versions being compared to narrow down the differences to your window of interest, e.g. from 2015.0.110.1 to 2015.0.110.2.

Download The Building Coder Samples

The complete source code, Visual Studio solution and RvtSamples include file is provided in The Building Coder samples GitHub repository.

The version discussed above is release 2015.0.111.0.