The Building Coder

Rational BIM Programming at AU Darmstadt

I am attending Autodesk University in Darmstadt, Germany, and putting the final touches to my presentation tomorrow on Rational BIM programming using Revit and Forge. Here are the slides and the handout document in their current state in PDF format – Slide deck – Handout document – For your convenience, here is the full text of the latter as well... Read more →

Connecting Desktop and Cloud RTC Material

I am in the last stages of preparing my presentation this afternoon on connecting the desktop and the cloud for the RTC Revit Technology Conference Europe. For your and the audience's convenience, here are the materials I am presenting, and some of the main links to further information – Handout – Slide deck – Recording – Samples Connecting Desktop and Cloud... Read more →

DevDay@AU 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 – DevDay@AU... Read more →

Connecting Desktop and Cloud, Room Editor Update

Last week, I listed my three Revit Technology Conference classes on connecting the desktop and the cloud, The Building Coder chatroom, and published the full detailed handout of the lab on getting started with Revit macros. This week, I published the notes from the Revit API panel Q&A. So what do we have left to talk about? Oh yes, connecting the desktop and the cloud. That is actually the most interesting of the three, and also the topic of my Autodesk University session – Connecting the desktop and the cloud – Message and Takeaway – The 2D cloud-based round-trip room editor – FireRating in the cloud – The CompHound component tracker – Dotty animated 3D assembly instructions – Conclusion... Read more →

SVG, In-Memory Family, RevitLookup BoundingBox

The cloud accelerator kept me busy last week, I am working hard on the CompHound project and documenting that work on The 3D Web Coder. Besides that, I submitted several enhancements to various Revit add-in projects. Here are some of my recent activities – CompHound component tracker project development – RevitLookup displays element bounding box – SvgExport for Revit 2016 – In-memory family creation and structural stiffener migration from 2012 to 2016... 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 →

Split Personality and Revit API Class Diagram

Developers have been requesting a Revit API class diagram for years. There used to be one back in the dawn of time, up until the Revit 2010 API. Now the question came up again with a happy resolution in the Revit API discussion forum thread on the 2014 Revit object model. Before I get to that, I have an important personal announcement to make: The 3D Web Coder Commenced, Embarked, Blasted Off and Away In an attempt to clarify the... 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 →

Room Editor Element Properties and the Async Trap

I made significant progress with my Tech Summit preparations, in spite of trying to "dance at many weddings", as the Germans say, i.e. juggle too many balls at once, what with new technologies, meetups, hackathons, AU preparations, support cases, email requests, blogging and all the normal everyday admin work that we are all confronted with. I originally had plans for three main enhancements of the room editor: Display sheet, views and floor plan geometry Revit add-in part implemented, web part... Read more →

Web Workshop, Tech Summit Plans and Security

Last week, I mentioned my short visit to Gothenburg, Sweden, for a mini web workshop hosted by CAD-Q and promised you more information about it anon. Well, the time has come to summarise the results from that venue, and also start planning my internal Autodesk Tech Summit proposal, due today, February 7, at the latest. I was a bit surprised by the contents of the web workshop. I had expected to contribute my part, for an hour or two, and... Read more →

Exchange App Videos and DevTV YouTube Channel

I recently mentioned the Exchange App Portathon event at which you can Earn $100 Submitting an App. To further support and simplify this task, my colleagues Mikako Harada and Gopinath Taget have lately been busy creating a series of videos showing exactly how to publish apps to the Autodesk Exchange Store for Revit. The videos are also accessible from the Autodesk DevTV YouTube channel as part of the Publish Your Revit Apps to Autodesk Exchange Store playlist. Topic Length (min:sec)... Read more →

CouchDB Implementation and GitHub Repository

I more or less completed the research for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project. I'll describe some parts of that, and also address Three aspects of life and programming Room editor navigation Nested asynchronous database call-back functions Roomedit – my first GitHub project Debugging JavaScript with Firebug Screen snapshots on mobile devices Open source components used by Autodesk Retrieve slabs above specific walls Lazy, Simple and Perfect You will like the first slide of my upcoming tech summit... Read more →

Desktop to Cloud via DreamSeat CouchDB Client

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, I now started looking at storing the plan view room and furniture boundary loop data in the cloud. I wound up the main Revit add-in functionality using the ExtrusionAnalyzer to create a plan view boundary profile for the furniture and equipment family instances, sort and orient its output curves, determine their bounding box and visualise the results in a dynamically generated GeoSnoop .NET form for verification.... Read more →

Cloud & Mobile, Extensible Storage Data Use in Schedules

My topics for today are: Cloud and mobile topics I covered so far Cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing on any mobile device using SVG Extensible storage data use in schedules I am still meeting with my European DevTech colleagues here in Konk Leon, 'anse du Lèon', the cove of the lion, aka Le Conquet, Brittany. Yesterday, one of our topics was work we have done so far for cloud and mobile applications. It was very interesting to hear about... Read more →

2D SVG Editing on Mobile Device with Raphaël

As I mentioned last week, I took another look at displaying a 2D view of a Revit model on mobile devices using SVG to enhance the room polygon and furniture picker in SVG. That implementation displays a read-only view of the model, useful for picking and identifying elements, e.g. for querying or adding metadata to them. It would also be nice to be able to edit some data graphically, e.g. enable translation and rotation of the furniture and other family... Read more →

Room Polygon and Furniture Picker in SVG

I documented a number of personal and possibly naive ideas and experiments regarding mobile device room location as a result of my previous so-called education day four weeks back. Well, last Friday I had another one :-) This time I took a deeper and hopefully very slightly wiser look at ideas for enabling the following kind of workflow: Extract relevant data from the BIM. Populate a cloud database to provide ubiquitous access to relevant data. Serve up relevant data in... Read more →

Mobile Device Room Location

I had a so-called education day last Friday, and one of our current goals for these days is to learn about mobile and cloud computing. Here is my account of activities and research that day. Please excuse me for exposing my fallibility in this rambling account of a spontaneous unstructured single-person work-in-progress project. The task I set myself was to query the location of a mobile device and determine the room it is located in in the Revit model. That... Read more →