The Building Coder

Changing Text Colour

Here are some notes on changing text colour and a nice node.js web scraping tutorial – Changing text colour via the text note type – Web scraping using node.js... Read more →

Retrieving Newly Created Element Ids

An add-in will often need to retrieve the elements that it just created for further processing. Frequently, the Revit API method used to create them will return their element ids. Sometimes, that is not the case. Now this topic arose again in a couple of cases and brought some other aspects to mind – Using the element lister – Consecutive element ids – Retrieving recently added elements – AEC job openings in Munich and elsewhere... Read more →

DevDays, Keynote Manager and REX Extensions

Let's highlight a few recent threads from the Revit API discussion forum. Before getting to those, a quick pointer to the DevDays Online recording from last week – DevDays online presentations on Revit API updates – External command with ribbon button sample – RevitAddinKeyNoteSystem keynote manager – REX extensions versus Revit add-ins – Reloading Revit links from user selected folder – Converting all parameter values to metric... Read more →

NewFamilySymbolProfile Sample Add-In

Questions on how to use NewFamilySymbolProfile have come up a couple of times in the Revit API discussion forum. The short answer is: retrieve the family symbol from the profile family, then call the creation application NewFamilySymbolProfile method. I implemented a new sample add-in for you to demonstrate the steps using the Profiles_L-Angles.rfa profile family... Read more →

MergedViews and Exporting to a Single DWG

Some insight on the use of the MergedViews property provided by the DGN, DWG and DWG export options classes and other ideas to export multiple views into a single DWG file – Question: I want to combine and export multiple views into one single DWG file. I set the option MergedViews, but the code still generates multiple DWG files for the views... Read more →

DirectShape from BrepBuilder and Boolean

Here is an interesting code snippet illustrating the use of BRepBuilder and Boolean operations to generate a DirectShape. It might come in useful somewhere, even though this approach is non-optimal to address the task at hand, as explained below... Read more →

Rotation Adjusts and Fixes Conduit End

I listed several possible approaches to trigger a refresh of an element's graphics display. Here is another one: Applying element rotation to adjust and fix conduit end... Read more →

Efficiently Retrieve Crop Box for Given View

Konrads Samulis shared a very nice solution to retrieve the crop box for a given view using a highly efficient parameter filter in his comment on rotating a plan view. In digging up this old thread, I found something quite curious in the API in 18.1, that I'm not sure was there before. The method of using a temporary transaction (with rollback) to find the element id of the crop box was taking a very long time on a large model, so I did a bit of digging to see how I could improve it. I noticed that in the built-in parameter ID_PARAM of the crop box contains the element id of the view it's in. E.g., the crop box 'points' to the id of the view it is in using ID_PARAM... Read more →