Export DWG for each Type in Revit Family

[chad_boss]

I asked this question at AU and was told during the Revit API roundtable that there were many "simple and easy" ways to do this. Well, I have been unable to find any examples of this on any blogs or forums, so I'm posting the question here in hopes of getting a simple answer. Put very simply, if I have a family with a type text catalog containing 100 different types, how can I export one dwg for each type. Basically, how can I create a block library by placing and exporting each type in a family. Sounds simple enough, right?

[BobbyC.Jones]

Are you looking to write your own simple utility to do this, or are you looking for a simple utility that's already written?

[chad_boss]

I'm open to writing it if nothing is currently available off the shelf. My experience is with the .NET API in AutoCAD, not Revit, so I'm not as aware of its capabilities. I understand that it is purely event driven, and cannot really be run in a "headless" fashion like AutoCAD can. It would not be ideal, but even a utility that does require some user interaction (selecting the family, for example), and automates the process of placing each type and exporting as DWG would be helpful. Currently, a human being has to place each type and do the export, so any automation would be an improvement.
I did speak to one vendor in the exhibit hall who discouraged the idea. They said that doing a simple dwg export of each type would result in a lot of stuff being included in the DWG that I do not want. Not a very clean file, in other words. So perhaps what I'm asking for would not be very useful. That could be why I can't find utilities that already do this.

[BobbyC.Jones]

I honestly don't know if there's anything pre-built out there.  I believe the API has everything you need to accomplish this.  I've used it to load families, insert type instances, and export files to .dwg format, unfortunately not all in the same app though  🙂

As for the .dwg quality, export one manually and see what it looks like; the manual export won't be any different than an export via the API.  And you can post process the .dwgs with the AutoCAD API. I do that with a little app that exports all of our sheets to .dwg and processes them in the background with the core console.