The Building Coder

Lengthen Ducts and Highlight Links

Modifying duct length, highlighting linked elements using SetReferences and determining whether a form is currently displayed by implementing an IsMainWindowActive predicate... Read more →

Refresh Graphics, Start View and Excel

Refreshing graphics, exchanging data, setting the start view, and random titbits related to AI, politics and climate – UpdateAllOpenViews – Refreshing spot elevation prefix – Excel data exchange options – Defining the start view – How big is a LLM – Base rate fallacy – Last year was hot – Previous climate changes negligeable – PV panel price trend... Read more →

Deleting Storage and Picking a Symbol

Interesting hints from the forum and thoughts on feedback, community and communication – Unload IFC links to delete extensible storage – Picking, selection and UI design – Feedback is always a great gift – Scott Peck and community building... Read more →

RevitLookup, WPF, Preventing Modification

Different approaches to prevent modification of certain elements and the latest news on RevitLookup – Prevent modification – RevitLookup updates – RevitLookupWpf – Pilcrow... Read more →

Selection in Link, Cancel in Export, Multithreading

Cool topics to wrap up this hot and exciting week – Are you using the derived analytical model? – Pick room in current project or linked model – Determine whether custom export was cancelled – Multi-threading with the single-threaded Revit API – Beginner’s guide to abstraction... Read more →

Multi-Threading Family Instance Placement Monitor

Kennan Chen perfected his family instance placement monitor by elegantly combining the Revit API with additional .NET timer and multi-threading functionality in a novel fashion seldom seen in a Revit add-in... Read more →

Design Automation API, Stacks, Collectors and Links

The ultimatively painless introduction to the Forge Design Automation API, a solution for creating two stacked ribbon items, reinitialising filtered element collectors and picking a face in a linked file – Forge Design Automation API webinars – Stacking two 24x24 ribbon items – Reinitialising the filtered element collector – Use CreateReferenceInLink to select a face in a linked file... Read more →

Bounding Box Filter is Always Axis Aligned

This is pretty obvious, once you think about it, and apparently worth pointing out anyway: The outline defining a bounding box filter is always aligned with the cardinal axes – Rotating Min and Max distorts the box – Rotate target elements or use a solid filter... Read more →

Reference Stable Representation Magic Voodoo

Let's end the week with a truly magnificent contribution and research result provided by Scott Wilson in the Revit API discussion forum. Scott responded to Pat Hague's recent thread on converting local family instance coordinate of a selected edge to project coordinates, saying, Yeah the Stable Reference Strings can be used to get at areas of the Geometry API that aren't fully exposed – I love playing around with them. Sometimes I stumble upon something cool such as this solution for a situation in which the geometry returns no reference for a family instance... Read more →

Drop-down Enumerated Parameter Values

I repeatedly hear from developers who wish to define a specific enumerated set of parameter values for their add-ins and limit the selection to these values in the element property palette user interface. Internally, Revit does implement a system to handle this, for instance by using negative element ids for element property drop-down list enumerations. This has also been a long-standing wish list item, and unfortunately still remains in that state, currently incorporated in the issue CF-3498 API wish: drop-down enumeration parameters for combo box... Read more →

Sending a Room Boundary to an SVG Node Web Server

Yesterday, I implemented and published a simple Node.js web server to display an SVG polygon. In that post, you can define the polygon path manually in a text box and invoke the web server by clicking a button. Obviously, the same system can be driven automatically. Let's look at a way to extract the boundary polygon or a Revit room element, convert that to SVG, and invoke the web server to display it. Here is the room element in Revit,... Read more →

Element Selection Changed Event

Many add-in developers are interested in being notified when the current selection changes in the Revit user interface. Among other things, it led to the implementation of the selection watcher using the Idling event and was one aspect of the discussion of element level events. Checking for Selection Changes in Idling Event Handler Ken Goulding submitted a comment on that, saying: When you mentioned "Element Level", I was hoping that included element selection events, but that does not seem to... Read more →

SelFilter, a Powerful Generic Selection Filter Utility

I recently discussed the minimalist generic selection filter implementation JtElementsOfClassSelectionFilter that I added to The Building Coder samples. Alexander Buschmann of IDAT GmbH responded to that and says: I saw your generic SelectionFilter class and this reminded me of a little pet project I've done in my spare time that I thought your readers might be interested in. Two things always bothered me about the ISelectionFilter: You have to create a class to use it. Though most often you just... Read more →

Futureproofing and Determining Intersecting Elements

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