The Building Coder

Events, UV Coordinates and Rooms on Level

A lot of interesting solutions were shared in the Revit API discussion forum and private email messages during my absence last week, and several exciting events are looming – Forge Accelerator in Gothenburg – AEC Hackathon in Munich – Autodesk University in London – Retrieve and map texture UV coordinates exporting geometry and material – Collect all rooms on a given level... Read more →

Dynamic Scripts, Model Elements, Vertical Alignment

Happy New Year of the Rooster! The Spring Festival is underway celebrating the Chinese New Year. Meanwhile, we continue our usual ongoing celebration of exciting Revit API news items – PyRevit dynamic cs script loader – Selecting all physical elements in model – Vertical TextNote alignment... Read more →

Determining Views Showing an Element

The topic of how to determine all views in which a given element is visible has been discussed several times on the past, and a couple of viable solutions have been suggested. However, for large projects, performance becomes an issue. This question was raised again by Abba Lustgarten and Erik Eriksson in the Revit API discussion forum thread on finding views in which an element is visible (by geometry or actual visibility), with Erik sharing a View extension method IntersectsBoundingBox that helps alleviate the performance impact... Read more →

Flipping a Section View and Forge Webinar 3

I already created a starting point for the new roomedit3d incarnation last week, in its own repository. This week, I agreed with Philippe to retain the new project in an own branch within the Forge boilerplate code sample collection. Hopefully, that will simplify keeping my BIM sample synchronised with any future updates make to that. Now I need to get started implementing and testing the actual viewer extension functionality itself. My main topic today is something different and purely Revit API oriented, besides the next Forge session – Flipping a section view – Forge webinar series... Read more →

Vacation End, Forge News and Bounding Boxes

I am back from a very relaxing vacation. I did next to nothing, and that felt fine. Meanwhile, obviously, lots of important and exciting Forge community and Revit API related happenings – PyRevit Blog – Forge DevCon 2016 material and 2017 dates – Forge forums closing in favour of StackOverflow – Forge Accelerator in Munich – Bounding Box ExpandToContain Extension Methods – Bounding Box and Lower Left Corner of Rooms – Bounding Box of Selected Elements or Entire Model – Setting 3D section box to selected elements' extents... Read more →

Filtering for View Specific Elements

While preparing for the Forge DevCon in SF and the Athens Forge meetup and web server workshop at The Cube Athens, I also happened to hear about the solution to the question raised by Chema in the Revit API discussion forum thread on deleting an area in a drafting view – I need to delete some elements (detail items) in a given area of my drafting view... Read more →

Named Guid Storage for Project Identification

I want to continue working on the TrackChangesCloud project asap. So far, it only consists of the Revit add-in to determine and list the changes made to the BIM. The interesting part will be to store the results in a cloud database for analysis and reporting. A prerequisite for that is a reliable way to identify Revit project documents. I already explored that topic when starting to implement the FireRatingCloud sample... Read more →

How to Distinguish Redundant Rooms

A couple of interesting Revit API issues were resolved during my recent absence. Let's start with this question raised by Miroslav Schonauer and resolved by Diane Christoforo: Using the terminology as shown in Schedules, I need to report all 'Not Placed', 'Redundant' and 'Not Enclosed' rooms... Read more →

API, SDK and View Section Box Element Intersection

Trying to keep track of the overwhelming information flow provided by the numerous discussions on the Revit API discussion forum is impossible. Here are two little titbits from the past few days – Basic Revit API and SDK Access, Online and Offline – Filtering for Elements Intersecting a View Section Box... Read more →

All Model Text, StringSearch 2016 and New Jobs

I migrated another one of my samples to Revit 2016: StringSearch. That was prompted by a question on extracting all visible text from the Revit model that I will take a closer look at below – ADN Internship and Other Jobs – Extracting all Visible Text from the Revit Model – StringSearch for Revit 2016... Read more →

Quick, Slow and LINQ Element Filtering

I arrived back safe and sound in Switzerland after the exciting week at Autodesk University. Another happy arrival is my first grandson: He was preceded by his big sister almost two years ago. Life goes on. I have been wanting to highlight the difference between quick and slow element filters for quite a while, and now a query came in that provides an ideal opportunity – Use of LINQ with filtered element collectors – Revit element filter classification – Filter types – Efficiency guidelines – Logical filters – Quick filters – Slow filters... Read more →

AU, IoC, Banks and Not To Delete While Iterating

Autodesk University is already nearing its end. It went by so fast! I attended a bunch of brilliant classes, took notes during Cyrille Fauvel's cloud and mobile expert panel, and successfully presented my own two, the Revit API expert panel and connecting desktop and cloud. That led to a completely different topic – SpatialElementGeometryCalculator bug fix – do not delete while iterating – SpatialElementGeometryCalculator migration to Revit 2016 – IoC, the Internet of Cows – Two nice Iain Banks Quarry quotes... Read more →

[email protected] and Using a Custom Exporter for 2D

Several developers recently asked how to export 2D shapes through a custom exporter. I recently discussed this issue with Arnošt Löbel and below present a summary and combination of several different conversation threads on the topic. First, let me mention that I arrived safe and sound at Autodesk University. I travelled on my birthday last week, so I was upgraded to fly in style – in a sledge – sleeping in the desert – [email protected] Read more →

Filtering Samples and RAC 2016 Features

The issue of simple filtered element collector samples was raised in a private message. I do not like to receive private messages and avoid answering them in private. I always prefer to discuss everything I do in public and enable the entire community to contribute and share when possible. In this case, such a message led to the discussion below. I'll also point to an overview of Revit Architecture 2016 Features... Read more →

Change Type, Iterate Elements, Create Family

Let's wrap up this hectic week with a couple more recently answered issues and one non-Revit note – Changing element type – Iterating over elements – Creating an electrical family – La costola di Adamo... Read more →

Intersect Solid Filter, AVF vs DirectShape Debugging

We already discussed the important topics of the analysis visualisation framework AVF, DirectShape (mesh import, new functionality), and the ElementIntersectsSolidFilter. Today, let's look at a little-know restriction on the latter and how to work around it, raised and solved by Miroslav Schonauer, Solution Architect in Autodesk Consulting, and Scott Conover, Software Development Manager of the Revit API team: ElementIntersectsSolidFilter problem Resolution Rectangular prism solid construction DirectShape is easier than AVF for prototyping and visualisation ElementIntersectsSolidFilter Problem Question: I have a... Read more →

Using ReferenceIntersector in Linked Files

Quite a while ago, we had a Revit API discussion forum thread on the use of the ReferenceIntersector in linked files. Apparently, some restrictions on that have been removed in Revit 2016. Before getting to that, let me mention that I have been very busy in the past few days in the Revit API discussion forum, answering various cases, and on The 3D Web Coder, implementing a cloud-based enhancement for the FireRating Revit SDK sample. Steps Towards a Cloud-Based FireRating... Read more →

FindInserts Retrieves All Openings in All Wall Types

On Tuesday, I presented the new SpatialElementGeometryCalculator sample for calculating gross and net wall areas. It discusses a whole bunch of interesting aspects, e.g.: Use of the SpatialElementGeometryCalculator class. Porting a VB.NET Revit add-in to C#. Use of the temporary transaction trick. Use of filtered element collectors to determine all openings in a wall. Filtered element collector optimisation possibilities, e.g. integer instead of string comparison, use of a parameter filter instead of .NET post-processing. Vilo submitted a very relevant comment... 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 →

Isolating Elements of a Given System

I am very glad to present another post contributed by Victor Chekalin, or Виктор Чекалин, who already shared many valuable insights and in-depth Revit API research in the past: On the Russian developer forum, the user goblya asked an interesting question. He needs to hide all elements except those that belong to a specific given system. There are some interesting moments in the solution. The main idea is to create the filter, assign this filter to the active view and... Read more →

WebGL Goes Mobile and Sorted Level Retrieval

Today, let's look at a generic WebGL and a specialised Revit API issue: WebGL on all Apple platforms and sorted level retrieval. WebGL Goes Mobile Apple announced full support of WebGL for its desktop and mobile browsers, so WebGL goes truly cross platform, as pointed out by Paul Flanagan: Previous claims of cross-platform support for this HTML5 standard were largely worthless because they did not include the iPhone, iPad, or desktop Safari. That has changed, and this standard for 3D... Read more →

Futureproofing and Determining Intersecting Elements

I continued cleaning up the obsolete API usage in The Building Coder samples, an... Read more →

Selection Filters, Adjacency and the Good Universe

Today, let's look at: A generic selection filter implementation Determining adjacent rooms and spaces The good universe A Generic Selection Filter Implementation Yesterday, I presented my new JtPairPicker element pair selection utility class. It included a templated selection filter class. I later realised that I could make use of that in several other places as well, replacing the existing explicit Wall, CurveElement and Pipe selection filters by a generic JtElementsOfClassSelectionFilter one instead: ///

/// Allow selection of elements of... Read more →

New Text Note and Text Width Calculation

How can I determine the exact width of a Revit text note? This is the topic of the Revit API discussion thread on textnote width calculate minimum. We worked through a whole series of implementation attempts, mostly suggested by Scott Wilson, who also finally suggested the one that currently seems to be optimal and near perfect: Question: When creating a new TextNote I'm given the option to give the TextNote a LineWidth Property. I understand this is the 1:1 scale... Read more →

Is a Given Element Hidden in a View?

Lately, several people have asked about how to determine the visibility of an element relative to a given view crop box. Here is a nice little stand-alone method IsElementHiddenInView that can be plugged in to any add-in to answer that question, plus a couple of others as well, shared by Frode Tørresdal of Norconsult Informasjonssystemer AS. For any given element e and view v, it returns true if e is hidden in v. This is determined by performing the following... Read more →

Creating a Sloped Wall

Several questions concerning programmatic creation of sloped walls came up recently, so let's take a look at that, point to some existing samples, and implement a fantastic new one that does it all, including mass family creation, instance insertion and face creation in one fell swoop: How to programmatically create a sloped wall Sloped wall versus sloped slab Creating a sloped wall from mass The Creator CreateModelLine method The Building Coder Samples download Floor creation fails for foundation floor types... 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 →

CreateLinkReference Sample Code

The Revit 2014 API introduced a whole bunch of linked RVT document interaction enhancements: Identifying links Obtaining linked documents Link creation Link load and unload Link path type Conversion of geometric references Room tag creation from linked rooms Picking in links They all provide important and useful functionality. Let's take a look at one of them in particular as well as another issue that just cropped up: Conversion of a geometric reference in a linked RVT model Triggering a dynamic... Read more →

Views Displaying Given Element, SVG and NoSQL

I am slowly getting back to normal working mode after the AEC Hackathon last weekend and the neat project that we worked on there, so I finally get around to publishing this post that I started working on last week. The only remaining issue is of a physical nature: my feet are still swollen after flying to New York on Friday, sitting and working non-stop at the Hackathon from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon, standing for a couple of hours... Read more →

Profiling Revit Add-ins and RoomEditorApp Enhancements

Today we take a look a profiling tool that works with Revit add-ins, and a few small new enhancements to my RoomEditorApp. The entire following article was contributed by Ben Bishoff of Ideate Software: Profiling Revit Add-ins using GlowCode Performance profiling tools allow you to increase the speed of your code by pinpointing slow methods and methods that are called excessively. For the past several releases, we have successfully used GlowCode real-time performance profiler (www.glowcode.com) to analyse and improve the... Read more →

Using Generic Collections with Filters and Forms

Today I discuss some uses of generics to elegantly and efficiently handle lists of Revit elements and .NET Windows forms, specifically: One line of code to retrieve all printable floor plan views from the BIM. One line of code to retrieve all selected floor plan views from a Windows check box list. This is my first step starting to implement the new RoomEditorApp features for my generic 2D simplified BIM editor Tech Summit presentation. The current tentative planned workflow steps... Read more →

Adding New Materials from List Updated

Back in the year 2010, I discussed a simple little system based on a Revit add-in named AddMaterials to generate new materials in a Revit project based on a list of required material properties stored in an Excel spreadsheet. The input data includes: Material Name Code Title Strength Graphics RGB colour values Transparency Surface pattern Cut pattern Identity Filter criteria Descriptive information Custom parameters All the further workflow details are described in the original post, of course. The add-in was... Read more →

Deleting Unnamed Non-Hosting Reference Planes

Once upon a time, while teaching a Revit API class, the training participants identified a problem that was simple enough to be used as a filtered element collector learning example and did something useful at the same time: deleting reference planes not hosting any elements, implemented as the stand-alone external command DeleteUnnamedNonHostingReferencePlanes. It deletes all reference planes that have not been named and are not hosting any elements. Here is another thread discussing filtering reference planes and explaining the use... Read more →

Text File Driven Automatic Placement of Family Instances

My colleague Emmanuel Di Giacomo recently asked me for an application to automatically place Revit family instances in a project at a list of X, Y, Z coordinates read from a text file. A similar add-in was already published for Revit 2011 at Revit Today. The user interface is minimal: This form enables the following simple and effective workflow to achieve a lot of functionality in very few lines of code, significantly aided and abetted by the combo box DataSource... Read more →

Set View Section Box to Match Scope Box for Revit 2014

A year ago, we looked at setting the view section box to match its scope box, in particular: How to retrieve the exact geometric location, size and orientation of the scope box. How to set the exact geometric location, size and orientation of the 3D view section box. Dan Rumery of BVN Donovan Hill recently submitted a comment to point out an error in the code presented there: I think you'll find there's a bug in both versions of your... Read more →

Saving a Solid to a SAT File Implementation

During my recent vacation, I published a description by my colleague Akira Kudo describing how to research the Revit SDK samples to find all the required bits and pieces to solve the task of saving a temporary in-memory Revit solid to an external SAT file. Victor Chekalin, or Виктор Чекалин, reacted to that and provides a complete Visual Studio project to demonstrate the full implementation of that functionality. You can download it as a zip archive or clone the project... Read more →

Determine Location Attributes and Retrieve Key Elements

Here are two issues that we have visited in the past and seem to be worth recapitulating and summarising, on determining the location attributes of an element and retrieving all key elements in a key schedule. Determining the Location Attributes of a Component Element Question: I have extracted data from a Revit model via DBLink. Now I would like to establish a relation between a component element and its location-centric attributes, specifically its Level, Space, and the Room it is... Read more →

Access to Individual Elements in Linked Projects

Access to individual elements in linked projects is a relatively simple matter, but can still cause some confusion, as we can see below. We looked at various aspects of linking files and accessing the linked element data and geometry in the past, e.g. Linked files Hiding linked files List linked elements Access to linked file geometry List linked files and TransmissionData Linked element geometry access Selecting a face in a linked file Arnošt Löbel's AU 2012 class CP3455 on managing... Read more →

Retrieving All Available Line Styles

I mentioned an AEC DevBlog post providing sample code showing how to retrieve all line styles through the CurveElement GetLineStyleIds property and mentioned that you can create a temporary curve element to invoke the property on in a separate transaction which is rolled back afterwards. Actually, there is no need at all for all this rigmarole, as the following answer to a developer query shows: Question: I need to retrieve all the available line styles in a project. I did... Read more →

View Filter API

One long-standing developer wish list item that was fulfilled by the Revit 2014 API is the ability to access, add and control the view filters listed in the visibility dialogue. The Revit API now provides the following methods supporting this: View.AddFilter() View.SetFilterVisibility() View.SetFilterOverrides() Here are several variations of the request for this functionality that help understand the need and new possibilities by highlighting the numerous ways in which it can be used: Question 1: We want to programmatically achieve what... Read more →

Language Independent Section View Type Id Retrieval

I already discussed changing the viewport type and mentioned Steve Mycynek's all-encompassing AU class CP3133 Using the Revit Schedule and View APIs explaining everything else there is to know about the topic of generating new views. Here is an important language independence enhancement for this provided by Håkan Wikemar of AEC AB, who asked: Question: I ran into a little problem trying to create some section views, in which a view type element id has to be specified: NyViewSectionB =... Read more →

Sydney Revit API Training and Vacation

My days down under were pretty intense. I left Switzerland Sunday night and arrived safe and sound in Sydney early Tuesday morning. I took the train from the airport into the town centre and back out again to the Autodesk offices at Macquarie Park in North Sydney. Three hours later, I was teaching the two-day Revit API training. At the time of writing this, it is Thursday afternoon and I am sitting on the plane back home again. I am... Read more →

Family API – Nested Type, Instance and Symbol Retrieval

Welcome to the third and final part of the detailed discussion on use of the Family API in the project environment, covering scenario 3 and the remainder from the following list of topics: Family editor product functionality Key family concepts Building your first parametric Revit family Slide deck bullets Complete slide decks Family API topics API scenario 1 – load family and place instances Checking whether a family is loaded Find a database element by type and name Loading a... Read more →

Family API – Create Type, Select and Modify Instances

Welcome to the second part of the detailed discussion on use of the Family API in the project environment, covering scenario 2 from the following list of topics: Family editor product functionality Key family concepts Building your first parametric Revit family Slide deck bullets Complete slide decks Family API topics API scenario 1 – load family and place instances Checking whether a family is loaded Find a database element by type and name Loading a family Placing family instances Accessing... Read more →

Family API Add-in – Load Family and Place Instances

The day before yesterday, I presented the contents of Steven Campbell's key family concepts and parametric family classes from the Revit API DevCamp in Moscow, and an overview of the related family API topics representing my humble contribution to the latter. If you read that post immediately after it was first published, I suggest you go back and have a quick look again now, since I revisited it and added a significant chunk of information after the initial publication. Now... Read more →

Removing Deprecated API Compilation Warnings

I completed The Building Coder sample migration to Revit 2014 back in April, but it was still generating 111 warnings due to use of obsolete API calls. After migrating the ADN training lab material last week, I thought I could now turn my attention back to resolving these warnings. I replaced 27 calls to the get_EndPoint method, which actually refers to the EndPoint property, by the new GetEndPoint method. That reduced the count to 84 warnings. Replacing the obsolete creation... Read more →

Migrating a Built-in Category and Other Things

Here is a category related issue that appeared when migrating from the Revit 2013 to the Revit 2014 API, plus a several other typical simple little Revit API questions from the last day or two: Migrating the room separation lines built-in category Storage of RGB colour values for materials Updating a DXF link Retrieving truss family elements Retrieving stair stringer data Storing custom data Migrating the Room Separation Lines Built-in Category Question: I get the following error while migrating my... Read more →

Accessing and Filtering by Ramp Material

I had a chat with Ning Zhou, who was away from the Revit API for a while and is now happily back in the fold. He explored how to access the material of a ramp element. Access to Ramp Material Question: Is there a way to get the ramp material information using API? I tried lots of paths and could not find anything. Answer (by Ning himself): I searched again using RevitLookup snoop. It turns out that basic material info... Read more →

Filter for Family Instances in a Room

I wish you a Good Friday. Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I need to determine the boundary loop polygons to represent the furniture and equipment family instances for manipulation on the mobile device. Before I can start extracting their geometry, I need to access the objects themselves, i.e. determine which family instances are contained in the selected room. As always, we use a filtered element collector to access the Revit database... Read more →

Revit 2014 and Supporting Columns

Revit 2014 Announced As you probably noticed by now, Revit 2014 has been announced. Here are the main product features: Design Enhanced Autodesk Exchange Dockable window framework New stairs and railings Temporary view templates to change view properties temporarily Point cloud improvements improve appearance and controls of point clouds Parameter variance for groups to vary the value of parameters assigned to groups New air terminal on duct enables placement of air terminal device on duct face New angle constraints to... Read more →