API: Copying drafting views between documents
There is a way to copy drafting views with all the contents from one document to another. The important part is to have all drafting view ids and all view-specific element ids owned by the views in one set and one call to CopyElements(). Then reference callouts/sections and view references preserved correctly as long as they refer to other drafting views in this set. I've played recently with this workflow and here is a quick and dirty prototype of a macro that will copy all drafting views from active document to all other documents opened in Revit. I tested it, it does keep all the reference callouts with correct shapes and leader configurations and all view references (as long as they refer to drafting views).
public void CopyAllDraftingViews()
{
Document activeDoc = this.ActiveUIDocument.Document;
if (activeDoc == null)
return;
FilteredElementCollector coll = new FilteredElementCollector(activeDoc);
ICollection<ElementId> viewIds = coll.OfClass(typeof(ViewDrafting)).ToElementIds();
if (viewIds.Count == 0)
return;
IList<ElementId> allElementsToCopy = new List<ElementId>();
foreach (ElementId viewId in viewIds)
{
allElementsToCopy.Add(viewId);
FilteredElementCollector collVS = new FilteredElementCollector(activeDoc);
ICollection<ElementId> viewOwnedIds = collVS.OwnedByView(viewId).ToElementIds();
foreach (ElementId viewOwnedId in viewOwnedIds)
allElementsToCopy.Add(viewOwnedId);
}
DocumentSet docSet = this.Application.Documents;
foreach (Document doc in docSet)
{
if (doc.Title != activeDoc.Title)
{
Document targetDoc = doc;
CopyPasteOptions options = new CopyPasteOptions();
try
{
if (allElementsToCopy.Count() > 0)
{
using (Transaction t1 = new Transaction(targetDoc, "Copy views"))
{
t1.Start();
ElementTransformUtils.CopyElements(activeDoc, allElementsToCopy, targetDoc, Transform.Identity, options);
t1.Commit();
}
}
}
catch (Exception)
{
throw;
}
}
}
}
Hi Matthew,
This exception should not be thrown if elementsToCopy contains all viewIds of all vie-specific elements in elementsToCopy. But we had a bug when this exception was thrown erroneously in the correct cases. The bug was fixed in Revit 2024.
Most likely you are using Revit that is older than Revit 2024. Could you please confirm that? If yes, could you try your code in Revit 2024 or later?
Thank you!
Hi Matthew,
First of all, thank you for the confirmation.
For the pre-2024 version of Revit you can try a different approach that might work for you. It has to consist of two separate API calls (in my case I tried macros) such that execution returns to Revit between them to make PostCommand() work. The code is below. I hope it helps:
public void CopyAllDraftingViews()
{
Document doc = this.ActiveUIDocument.Document;
if(doc == null)
return;
FilteredElementCollector coll = new FilteredElementCollector(doc);
ICollection<ElementId> viewIds = coll.OfClass(typeof(ViewDrafting)).ToElementIds();
if(viewIds.Count == 0)
return;
this.ActiveUIDocument.Selection.SetElementIds(viewIds);
this.PostCommand(RevitCommandId.LookupPostableCommandId(PostableCommand.CopyToClipboard));
}
public void PasteIntoEmptyDoc()
{
UIApplication uiapp = new UIApplication(this.Application);
uiapp.OpenAndActivateDocument("D:/EmptyDoc.rvt");
this.PostCommand(RevitCommandId.LookupPostableCommandId(PostableCommand.PasteFromClipboard));
}
Yes, that is what I meant, but did not explain it properly. I had 2 macros: executed the first one by pressing a button in the macro manager and then executed the second one. Thus, Revit had control in the interactive mode between the macro executions and that is when the first posted message went through. You cannot call these two methods consecutively in the API since this would lead to the exception you saw. Alternatively, you can have a modeless dialog in an API application with 2 buttons: pressing the first button would execute the first method (copy) and pressing the second button would execute the second method (paste). This would require some user interaction though, and that might not be appropriate to your workflow.
