The Building Coder

Revit 2015 R2, UR4 and Dimension Prefix & Suffix

Today, let's take a quick look at the Revit product updates that were published last week and a discussion on workarounds for an issue making use of the dimension Prefix and Suffix properties: Revit 2015 Release 2 and Revit 2015 Update Release 4 API enhancements Dimension prefix & suffix workarounds Revit 2015 Release 2 and Revit 2015 Update Release 4 Two different Revit updates were released last week: Revit 2015 Release 2 (R2) and Revit 2015 Update Release 4 (UR4).... Read more →

Events, Again, and Creating an Extrusion Roof

Jon and Scott Wilson discussed some issues creating extrusion roofs on arbitrary planes in the Revit API discussion forum in the past couple of days. One neat spin-off is a simple little external command that shows the basic use of the NewExtrusionRoof method, so I took the opportunity of adding that to The Building Coder samples. Before getting to the details of that, here is a little update on the upcoming events: October hackathons and AU Germany Autodesk University in... Read more →

Modifying, Saving and Reloading Families

I recently grabbed one of those rare opportunities to do a little bit of coding myself, to answer a question on modifying and reloading a family. More precisely, the task at hand is to modify the text note type font in all of the loaded families. I'll take a look at that below. First, lets look at a simpler question, on how to save a family after editing it, raised by Raunoveb on the Revit API discussion forum: Saving Family... Read more →

Hackathon, the Climate and my CO2 Footprint

Last week, I attended an interesting and rather sobering presentation on sustainability by Niko Paech entitled Befreiung vom Überfluss – liberation from excessive abundance – the German title is shorter and sounds better, for a change. That prompted me to have a look at my own CO2 footprint. This just happened to coincide more or less with the People's Climate March taking place simultaneously all around the world, including ten thousand participands in Berlin, Geneva and Zurich. Before getting to... Read more →

Job Opportunities, Events, Plans and Planes

Lots of stuff is going on and we have an exciting heavy duty weekend ahead of us: ADN API evangelist job opportunities Autodesk Exchange Apps hackathon this weekend October events and travel in Europe Comparing a plane and a face ADN API Evangelist Job Opportunities I recently mentioned an ADN API evangelist job opening in San Francisco. We are actually looking for other talented new people to join the ADN DevTech team as well. The main openings right now are... Read more →

A Couple of Recent Issues

I have been quiet here for several days now, very busy working on Revit API cases, but nothing very generic to share here. Instead, let me mention a couple of quick answers by Scott Conover of the Revit API development team to some other recent issues that cropped up: Ribbon settings and drop down pin Determining whether a family instance is joined ReferenceIntersector and face How to modify family instance geometry Ribbon Settings and Drop Down Pin Question: How can... Read more →

ADN Labs Xtra on GitHub and RvtVa3c in Three.js

I had several cases recently discussing advanced Revit API exploration issues with experienced application developers new to the Revit API. Therefore, once again, the topic of available tools and their various uses came up. One important tool for me is the simple element lister, which is currently still part of the ADN Xtra labs, the precursor to the official ADN Revit API training labs. I had not yet migrated those to Revit 2015, so I now finally did so and... Read more →

Unique Names and the NamingUtils Class

The Revit API is still full of surprises. Here is another one that leads us to look at a utility class that you may not have noticed: Question: I am encountering a strange problem with the name checking functionality when creating ParameterFilterElements. The following code snippet creates two ParameterFilterElements with all identical settings except for a slight naming difference: public void ParameterFilterElementError( Document doc ) { ICollection ceilingCategory = new List(); ceilingCategory.Add( doc.Settings.Categories.get_Item( BuiltInCategory.OST_Ceilings ).Id ); using( Transaction tr =... Read more →

Architecture Mismatch Warning Disabler Update

The default Visual Studio settings will generate a processor architecture mismatch warning when compiling a Revit 2014 or 2015 add-in. Last year, I implemented a utility named DisableMismatchWarning.exe to recursively disable this warning in all projects in all subfolders of the current directory. Now I just happened to receive a new sample add-in project from a developer for testing that was not recognised by this utility, so I implemented an update for it. Before getting to that, let me share... Read more →

Autodesk View and Data API Webinar

I listed a whole bunch of upcoming events last week. Now I have yet another one to announce, a webinar introducing the Autodesk View and Data API, immediately preceding the exchange apps hackathon. Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon – September 20-21, 2014 There are less than two weeks left before the Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon, a two-day virtual web based coding 'festival' that will run from September 20 through to September 21, 2014. This year's event is bigger and better than... Read more →

Setting up a 3D View like a Section View

Lots of add-in developers have struggled with various aspects of setting up cameras and views. I summarised a number of them in two new topic groups: 5.37. Creating and Setting Up a 3D View 5.38. Creating and Setting Up a Section View I keep hoping that they cover everything one needs to know in this area, together with Steve Mycynek's all-encompassing AU class CP3133 Using the Revit Schedule and View APIs. Here is one recent example proving that this sometimes... Read more →

Debugging and Maintaining the Image Relationship

The Revit database contains a number of undocumented relationships, and it can be challenging and useful to discover them. Christian Tonn of kubit presents a powerful method to determine and maintain such a relationship using an officially supported approach instead: Question: Is it possible to get the ImageType object from an image you inserted in the Revit document with Document.Import? Answer: Not directly! I am using the Import method: bool Import( string file, ImageImportOptions options, View view, out Element element);... Read more →

AdnRme Update to Eliminate Obsolete API Usage

The ADN Revit MEP HVAC and electrical sample AdnRme version 2015.0.0.2 produces three compilation warnings, all three saying: 'Autodesk.Revit.DB.Family.Symbols' is obsolete: 'This property is obsolete in Revit 2015. Use Family.GetFamilySymbolIds() instead.' So let's do what the man says. The code producing the first two instances of the warning in the module CmdChangeSize.cs looks like this: FilteredElementCollector collector = new FilteredElementCollector( doc ) .OfClass( typeof( Family ) ); foreach( Family family in collector ) { // Family category is not implemented,... Read more →

Custom Exporter GetCameraInfo

Here is a simple yet longstanding question with a surprisingly simple answer that should prove extremely helpful for all those who really need it, presumably including Mohan Sawant, who raised this issue in a comment on the DWF view definition and its camera settings: Question: Is there any programmatic access to the Revit camera target and FOV? For my application, I have to define a camera using position, target, up vector, projection type and field of view. I tried to... Read more →

Planes, Projections and Picking Points

Here is a query and some sample code from a Revit API newbie that led to several different interesting topics, in particular some ruminations on planes, projections, picking points and common extension methods that I hope will be of use to you too – yet another Monday monster post: Question: The macro below sets a work plane based on the active view and lets the user pick two points to get the area of a rectangle. This works for east... Read more →