The Building Coder

Explode a DWG

After yesterday's very practical note on creating a pipe cap, here is another slightly less practical note from Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH, who picked up on Sami's comment on subscribing to UI Automation events. Sami asks: Question: Is it possible to explode an imported DWG file using the API? Answer: After showing the mechanism of invoking commands twice, I do think this can be achieved. Just like all other ribbon elements, also the 'Explode' buttons are accessible via... Read more →

Command and Conquer When Switching Views

Today, February 3, is the first day of the Chinese New Year and the beginning of the spring festival, which lasts for fifteen days. This is a year of the Rabbit zodiac sign. Here is a duilian, a pair of lines of poetry, or actually a special form called chunlian, used as a New Year's decoration that expresses happy and hopeful thoughts for the coming year sent us by Joe Ye from Beijing: The meanings of these lines are: Top:... Read more →

Subscribing to UI Automation Events

Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH recently presented his results of exploring the Revit ribbon internals using UISpy and driving Revit using UI Automation. He sent an additional note to point out that this rapidly leads to many other very interesting possibilities, such as the following: Subscribing to UI Automation events could easily enable an application to be notified whenever a user... Creates a new Wall, Room, etc. Picks into the property list Hits the ribbon bar Is about to... Read more →

Happy New Year, Ribbon Spying and UI Automation

I hope you had a wonderful end of the last and beginning of the new year! Happy New Year to you all! I returned from the week of rest and was completely occupied with the backlog of ADN support cases in the past few days. Here is a really heavy-duty post to get us started again, and started with a bang! It revisits the never-ending and always popular issue of launching a Revit command programmatically, but this time based on... Read more →

DoorSwing Fix

I am spending this week in the UK. We are having a long-awaited EMEA DevTech team meeting today. We finally succeeded in creating a possibility for all ADN engineers working in the European region to get together face to face. I met some of my colleagues for the first time, for instance Marat, who is based in Moscow, and Kristine from Toronto (not really part of Europe). The rest of the week I will be attending an internal training course,... Read more →

Selection Watcher Using Idling Event

Here is a pretty cool example by Ken Goulding of using the Idling event to work around a little gap in the current Revit API. Ken posted a comment which triggered a pretty interesting conversation and culminated in the SelectionWatcher sample. Another interesting item that cropped up was the possibility to use PasteBin to share snippets of source code, as Ken did for parts of his initial implementation: Class implementation Sample usage The code listed there is now obsolete, though.... Read more →

Ribbon Icon Resolution

We are still on the Pantagruel, currently sailing from Norway to the west coast of Sweden. Here is a view from Preikestolen down into Lysefjord, where we went for a hike before leaving the Stavanger area: Here are some of us on deck the first day: That was before getting out onto the open sea and into higher winds, causing us to feel a lot less chirpy: The weather has been pleasant all the time, but the wind is very... Read more →

Simulating a Ribbon Textbox Label

On Wednesday evening I arrived in Stavanger on the coast of Norway, found the sailship Pantagruel and met the crew that I will be spending the coming week with. Thursday we went on a hike rather than sailing, because we happened to be so close to the spectacular Preikestolen or Pulpit Stone over the Lysefjord. We took our boat over from Stavanger to Jørpeland by motor, since the wind was exactly opposite our direction, and then spent all afternoon hiking... Read more →

Network Access to Add-In Manifest and Icons

We already discussed quite a few aspects of the add-in manifest files, including: A simple example of creating one for my first Revit 2011 plug-in, the pipe to conduit converter. The RevitAddInUtility which can be used to read and write add-in manifest files. My Guidize utility which can populate the add-in manifest ClientId GUID. A Guidize update which also handles the AddInId tag. The visibility mode which controls which in which Revit editor contexts an external command add-in appears. How... Read more →

Ribbon Tab Context Toggle

I'll be going to Munich next week to give my second Revit 2011 API training, and the first one using our completely revamped training material. I am very much looking forward to that. While giving Revit API trainings, we often learn something from the attendees, too. Here is a little tip brought up recently by such an attendee for those of us who are mainly interested in debugging our add-ins in Revit, and therefore happy to remain in the Add-In... Read more →

Add-In Applications for Multiple Revit Products

We recently discussed the add-in visibility mode, which only applies to external commands. The Revit API does not provide a similar built-in facility to control the loading and availability of an external application. This turned out to be an issue for Dave Echols of Hankins and Anderson, Inc., who very friendlily is sharing his solution to this lack with us here: Managing Custom Applications for Multiple Revit Products As a follow-up on and complement to the Add-In Visibility Mode posting,... Read more →

Add-In Visibility Mode

This Monday is the Pentecost holiday in Neuchâtel. I used it to make my first experiments using the add-in manifest visibility mode tag. The developer guide has the following to say about it: Provides the ability to specify if the command is visible in project documents, family documents, or no document at all. Also provides the ability to specify the discipline(s) where the command should be visible. Multiple values may be set for this option. Optional; use this tag for... Read more →

RevitAddInUtility

In a comment on the recent discussion of the Revit 2011 product GUIDs, David Bartliff raised an interesting question on the new Revit add-in utility DLL which triggered some internal discussion as well. Before addressing David's question, however, let's look at some background info on what this utility is about at all. Revit Add-In Utility DLL The Revit add-in utility DLL is a stand-alone .NET assembly which offers a dedicated API capable of reading, writing and modifying add-in manifest files.... Read more →

Adding Non-Commands to the Revit Ribbon

In between all the hullabaloo about the new version of Revit, here is some news dealing with the old one and the Revit Python shell implemented by Daren Thomas. Daren now found a way to add new items such as command buttons to a Revit ribbon panel without actually having any real underlying external command implementation to hook them up to. He uses Reflection.Emit to simulate the missing IExternalCommand implementation. Here is Daren's own description: I just published a post... Read more →

Custom Ribbon Tab Context Switch

Guy Robinson updated his custom ribbon tab solution to correctly handle context switching between standard projects and families. Read more →

Create a Real Revit Ribbon Tab

We made it to Paris on Friday after all, arriving a ten in the morning instead of the Thursday evening as planned. Still, we were able to successfully present the DevDays conference, so that was good. That was also the last day of my working year, at least officially. I spent the evening in Paris and had a nice train ride through the snow back to Switzerland on Saturday. I have a number of Christmas presents collecting here in my... Read more →

Custom Ribbon Tab

I am still on tour presenting at the Western European DevDays conferences, and with no time for blogging or responding to comments. In fact, I have almost no time for anything at all except presenting, meeting and discussing with participants during the day, and getting from one city to the next in the evenings. Right now I am sitting in the airport waiting for a plain to Milano. Back to Bella Italia, albeit for less than twenty-four hours. I was... Read more →

Ribbon Embed Image

Previous posts discussed the Revit 2010 Ribbon API, the associated Ribbon SDK Ribbon sample, and my use of it for the MEP sample ribbon panel. Krispy5 very friendlily posted a series of comments to the latter describing a detailed solution to embed the images used in the ribbon buttons into the Revit external application executable assembly. I implemented a sample application RibbonEmbedImage to make Krispy's solution more readable and readily available. This sample is obviously less a demonstration of any... Read more →

Revit 2010 Subscription Pack

The Autodesk Subscription Advantage Packs have been released, including ones for Autodesk Revit Architecture, MEP and Structure 2010. English versions are now available for download on Subscription Center. ADN members also have access to the subscription center by going to the ADN home page and selecting Autodesk Subscription Center. The subscription pack is also available directly from the ADN Revit download page. Look there for the Autodesk Revit 2010 September/October update. The Revit 2010 subscription packs provide the same minor... Read more →

Getting Started with the Revit 2010 API

I am back again from a great vacation in Italy which I mostly spent outdoors camping, swimming, cooking, and drinking cappuchino. Yesterday was the Jeûne Fédéral holiday (French) in Neuchâtel. I used that to make a first pass through my overfull email inbox. Meanwhile, here is a quick summary and overview of the material we have put together so far for getting started with the Revit 2010 API. Question: Do you have any updated information similar to the getting started... Read more →

MEP Sample Ribbon Panel

I am preparing our upcoming Revit MEP API webcast to be held on Thursday August 27th. To register, you can go to the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) DevTech API training schedule and filter for Revit MEP API. One thing I did today was to update our MEP sample external application from the Revit 2009 menu-based user interface to a 2010-style custom ribbon panel. Here is the code for the AddMenu method that was being used in Revit 2009 to create... Read more →

Add-In Ribbon Panel and Loading One Single Type

The Revit ribbon is context sensitive, so it switches to specific tabs under specific circumstances. For instance, if I select a wall in the model, it switches to the Modify Walls tab. This may seem like a limitation for add-ins, since all add-in commands are placed in the Add-Ins tab. Imagine I have an add-in which provides a command specific to walls. Ideally, I would like my command to be added to the walls Modify Walls tab. That is unfortunately... Read more →