Solutions, criticism, opportunities:
- Categories for legend components
- Encoding issue with Cyrillic characters fixed
- AEC customers demand better value
- Construction executive job
Categories for Legend Components
Richard RPThomas108 Thomas and Juan Jesús jjesusdelpino Del Pino Campos collaborated nicely to determine which categories that can create legend components:
Question: Is there a way to know if a legend component can be created from a determined category? E.g., I can create legend components from cable trays, but I can't do it with railings. I haven't seen any specific rule o parameter that specifies this property. Any ideas? Thanks.
Answer: I've found no obvious solution to this via the API, i.e., a Boolean property on the category class.
I believe also that Legend views don't have a specific class.
So, there is no static methods available on such for checking category suitability of placed elements that way either.
You'll find sketch based system families (floors/Railings/Stairs...) are not applicable since Legend views don't have a sketch plane.
If you think about it, apart from annotation objects, Legend views contain types not instances (since you usually drag the types onto the Legend from the project browser).
However, there is also no property for this indicated on ElementType class.
Response: I also have not found any solution for this through API, so I have ended up checking and making the list manually.
I put it here in case someone looking for the same thing comes:
FamilyInstances = [“OST_DuctAccessory”, “OST_PipeAccessory”, “OST_PlumbingFixtures”, “OST_StructuralFraming”, “OST_StructuralFoundation”, “OST_ElectricalEquipment”, “OST_SpecialityEquipment”, “OST_MechanicalEquipment”, “OST_LightingFixtures”, “OST_Furniture”, “OST_Casework”, “OST_Columns”, “OST_StructuralColumns”, ”OST_Doors”, ”OST_Sprinklers”, “OST_DuctTerminal”, “OST_DuctFitting”, “OST_PipeFitting”, “OST_Planting”, “OST_Windows”]; SystemFamilies = [“OST_CableTray”, ”OST_RoofSoffit”, “OST_Ceilings”, “OST_DuctCurves”, “OST_Roofs”, “OST_Walls”, “OST_StackedWalls”, ”OST_CurtainWallPanels”, “OST_Floors”, ”OST_PipeCurves”, ”OST_FlexPipeCurves”,” OST_Conduit”];
Many thanks to Juan Jesús and Richard for sharing this result.
I cleaned it up and added it to The Building Coder samples for posterity like this:
BuiltInCategory [] _bics_for_legend_component_with_FamilyInstance = new BuiltInCategory[] { BuiltInCategory.OST_Casework, BuiltInCategory.OST_Columns, BuiltInCategory.OST_Doors, BuiltInCategory.OST_DuctAccessory, BuiltInCategory.OST_DuctFitting, BuiltInCategory.OST_DuctTerminal, BuiltInCategory.OST_ElectricalEquipment, BuiltInCategory.OST_Furniture, BuiltInCategory.OST_LightingFixtures, BuiltInCategory.OST_MechanicalEquipment, BuiltInCategory.OST_PipeAccessory, BuiltInCategory.OST_PipeFitting, BuiltInCategory.OST_Planting, BuiltInCategory.OST_PlumbingFixtures, BuiltInCategory.OST_SpecialityEquipment, BuiltInCategory.OST_Sprinklers, BuiltInCategory.OST_StructuralColumns, BuiltInCategory.OST_StructuralFoundation, BuiltInCategory.OST_StructuralFraming, BuiltInCategory.OST_Windows }; BuiltInCategory[] _bics_for_legend_component_with_SystemFamily = new BuiltInCategory[] { BuiltInCategory.OST_CableTray, BuiltInCategory.OST_Ceilings, BuiltInCategory.OST_Conduit, BuiltInCategory.OST_CurtainWallPanels, BuiltInCategory.OST_DuctCurves, BuiltInCategory.OST_FlexPipeCurves, BuiltInCategory.OST_Floors, BuiltInCategory.OST_PipeCurves, BuiltInCategory.OST_RoofSoffit, BuiltInCategory.OST_Roofs, BuiltInCategory.OST_StackedWalls, BuiltInCategory.OST_Walls };
Slightly ****, I know.
Response: In the end I have had to use that list with BuiltInCategory entries in my code so your **** retentiveness has already been proven necessary haha.
Answer: Glad to hear it was useful for you!
I am in discussion with friends on the topic of perfection versus the Pareto 80-20 principle.
I try to favour both.
I see this as an effective demonstration that both can be achieved simultaneously.
In simple cases only, of course.
Luckily, all programming issues are simple, always.
Unless someone seriously messed them up.
Unfortunately, the most common case...
Encoding Issue with Cyrillic Characters Fixed
The encoding issues when reading data from size lookup tables with Cyrillic characters is resolved in the Revit 2021.1 update release.
The development team resolved the issue REVIT-153006 – Encoding issue reading data from size lookup table with Cyrillic characters -- 15738224 and report the good news:
We have now fixed and closed this issue in the development release.
It has been addressed in work done for REVIT-161509.
That fix is present in Revit 2021.1 and any version of Revit after that.
For previous versions, one option to try is to see if generating the CSV files as UTF-16 (i.e., 2 byte Unicode) will cause them to be read properly, even in older versions of Revit that do not contain the fix.
Please note that our support for loading UTF-8 and UTF-16 requires that the files contain the proper UTF signature BOM at the beginning of the file. The UTF-8 files provided as samples DO NOT, but you can re-save them as UTF-8 in almost any text editor and force generation of this signature. Then Revit knows how to properly load and encode them with the fix. Revit is not a full blown text processor, so it relies on the presence of that BOM to properly handle files. Without it, Revit assume they are 'normal' ANSI encoded files and thus will not process them correctly.
Correction after another, deeper, look at the code prior to this fix, in older versions of Revit: Unfortunately, upon further investigation, that code assumes the file is a set of single byte characters to load. Not even a proper ANSI code page encoding is being applied, although the workarounds look like that is possibly going on as part of the internal file read… Anyway, I do not think using any sort of Unicode encoding on the files in question for previous versions of Revit will work after all. It does in the current version, though.
AEC Customers Demand Better Value
An interesting critical article in AEC Magazine discusses how Autodesk AEC customers demand better value.
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