The Building Coder

Automation, Ribbon Panel, ItemExecuted and Vacation

Here is an interesting exploration of using UI Automation to traverse the Revit ribbon items and subscribe to an event enabling you to determine when certain commands are executed. I'll leave you to ponder this while I take a vacation in the snow next week. Happy Revit add-in programming! Question: I would like to keep track of all add-ins that are started on a given Revit installation. We currently keep track of all our own using specific routines in the... Read more →

Keyboard Shortcuts and Other News

A couple of questions on stackoverflow and the Revit API discussion forum prompted me to pick up the age-old issue of keyboard shortcuts again. Plus, I'd like to point out some news from the AEC Hackathon in New York and the AECbytes newsletter: AEC Hackathon in New York AECbytes newsletter How to programmatically retrieve keyboard shortcuts How to assign a keyboard shortcut to an external command How to programmatically create a keyboard shortcut AEC Hackathon in New York I attended... Read more →

View and Data API Sample in Swift and Mac OS Upgrade

As you know, we have a pretty impressive number of samples demonstrating the use of the View and Data API web services. We are currently reviewing them all to ensure their documentation is reliable and consistent. I picked Adam Nagy's workflow sample written in Swift to review. That required a look at the Swift programming language itself and a system upgrade before I could start with the review itself. Before getting to that, let me also mention the upcoming 3D... Read more →

From Hack to App – OBJ Mesh Import to DirectShape

I already took a couple of looks at the DirectShape element in the past: DirectShape Performance and Minimum Size DirectShape versus Families, Category and Texture A much deeper investigation was prompted by Eric Boehlke of truevis.com, knowledgeable in architecture and above all in photogrammetry. Eric visited the DevHack at Autodesk University in December 2014. Together, right there and then, we put together a prototype Revit add-in that reads an OBJ file and creates a DirectShape element from it. Eric continued... Read more →

Determining the Face Tangent at a Picked Point

Happy Valentine's Day! I keep repeating how much I love all kinds of geometric problems – besides my sweetheart, of course – merci filmool fier di scheeni Bliemli! Unfortunately, there are far too few of them around :-) Happily, Jordi just raised one in the Revit API discussion forum thread on an API C# question, providing another welcome opportunity to make use of the Face Project and ComputeDerivatives methods: Question: I'm coding a plugin for Revit 2015 that inserts a... Read more →

Displaying Progress Bar and Generating Animated GIF

A frequent request for Revit add-ins performing time-consuming tasks is to display a progress bar. My own progress bar implementation is provided by the ADN MEP sample application AdnRme, originally dating way back to 2009 and earlier still. Now Limin He of FM:Systems encountered and resolved an issue with his progress bar in VB.NET, raising the following comment on the topic of the new exceptions raised by multithreading in Revit 2015: Question: We came across the same issue described above... Read more →

Using Transaction Groups

We repeatedly discussed the optimal usage and error handling of transactions, mainly based on the expert advice of Arnošt Löbel, Sr. Principal Engineer of the Autodesk Revit R&D team: Scope and Dispose of Transactions Using Using Automagically Disposes and Rolls Back Handling Transaction Status and Errors Let's complete this with his most recent advice on handling transaction groups to combine multiple transactions into one undo: Question: I am creating an application that must do the following steps: Load a FamilySymbol... Read more →

Terminating a Family Instance Placement Loop with Esc

I presented the PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement method in June 2010 when it was newly introduced in the Revit API, together with a nice little solution temporarily subscribing to the OnDocumentChanged to access the newly added elements after terminating the placement interaction. Since then, the Revit 2015 API provided some Document API additions such as the method UIDocument.PostRequestForElementTypePlacement enabling an add-in to launch and to some extents control the full standard placement interaction between user and the Revit product. To retain control over... Read more →

Extensible Storage in a Worksharing Environment

Here is a thread from the Revit API discussion forum on working with extensible storage in a worksharing environment between Scott Wilson, Cshha, Erik Eriksson and Arnošt Löbel, Sr. Principal Engineer of the Autodesk Revit R&D team, that I find valuable and therefore edited and reproduced here, for preservation and clarity. By the way, if this topic is of interest and importance to you and your add-ins, you will probably also be interested in Scott Conover's Autodesk University 2013 class... Read more →

Understanding the Use of the UniqueId

Here is a thread from the Revit API discussion forum on understanding the use of the UniqueId between Erik Eriksson and Arnošt Löbel, Sr. Principal Engineer of the Autodesk Revit R&D team, that I find very valuable and therefore edited, for preservation and clarity: Question: In the early days, I thought that ElementId was a stable way of finding elements in a document, then I learned that UniqueId was the proper way. But I haven't been able to find enough... Read more →

Family Instance Area and Auto-Loading a Project File

I have been pretty busy answering queries on the Revit API discussion forum in the last few days. Here are two that I quite like that came up today, on calculating areas occupied by furniture and equipment family instances and loading a project file automatically on Revit start-up. Calculating Areas Occupied by Furniture and Equipment Family Instances This query was raised by Vyom Dixit on how to calculate model group elements area: Question: I am new to the Revit API.... Read more →

Revit 2015 R2 and the Read-Write Workset API

Finally, the Revit API provides a complete Workset API including creation and modification capabilities. The one snag is that it is currently limited to the subscription update release Revit 2015 R2. This issue was discussed a while back on the Revit API discussion forum, in the threads on R2 versus UR4 and worksets; I searched and re-searched for them frequently enough now to finally decide to promote the gist to a main blog post topic. Read-Write Workset API The Workset... Read more →

List Pipe Sizes and More Obsolete API Usage Removal

I was ill for a few days last week, with a fever and a virus. I also made a quick trip to Moscow, where we held the final event in this year's sequence of DevDays conferences. For the first time in my life, I gave my presentations in a woolly hat :-) I also rented my first airbnb flat ever, on Arbat street in the centre of town, and was pretty happy with that. I returned back to Switzerland on... Read more →