The Building Coder: Revit 2021 Unit Types in Family Type Catalogues

Unfortunately, the new unit type name functionality can cause a problem loading a family with a type catalogue:

Unit type update affects family type catalogue loading
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Padlocking The Building Coder

Unit Type Update Affects Family Type Catalogue Loading

Question: We have some families that fail to load in Revit 2021.

We have narrowed it down to a Revit change.

When you export PIPING__FLOW (GPM) data to a type 'Family Types' in previous versions of Revit, you get something like this:

Cold Water Flow##PIPING_FLOW##GALLONS_US_PER_MINUTE

However, when you do the same in Revit 2021, you get:

Cold Water Flow##PIPING_FLOW##US_GALLONS_PER_MINUTE

The bad news for us being that Revit 2021 does not accept GALLONS_US_PER_MINUTE anymore. Instead, it expects (and does not ‘upconvert’) the new US_GALLONS_PER_MINUTE.

This is a breaking change for our existing type catalogues.

Is there a published list of changes for parameters that we can review?

Answer: Yes, indeed, this is an intentional change. Sorry that it is affecting you so hard. Just as you say, no automatic upgrade from the previous version’s DB strings has been implemented.

We documented these changes in the developer guide.

The table of changes to database identifiers can be found at the bottom of the page on Introduction > Application and Document > Document Functions > Units.

New FreeCodeCamp Courses

I always enjoy browsing through the FreeCodeCamp courses recommended in Quincy Larson's newsletter.

Last week's bunch looked especially useful to me, for instance these:

Padlocking The Building Coder

Last week, colleagues pointed out that some of the Autodesk developer blogs were displaying a message saying 'Not secure' in the browser address bar:

The problem is caused by a mixed content error, where some references from the blog are not secure.

You can check the site either in Firefox, or using an external page, e.g., whynopadlock.com, which will conveniently show the references causing the mixed content error:

TEST RESULTS
Test Information
Tested URL https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/
Mixed Content - Errors
Soft Failure An image with an insecure url of "http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/tbc_banner6_1200_200.png" was loaded on line: 4572 of https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/.
This URL will need to be updated to use a secure URL for your padlock to return.

In The Building Coder, it was only the banner image, and it can be simply fixed by adding https to the image reference in the CSS.