Community Discussion – Revit

[daniel.Alvarado.cortes]

Hello Revit Users,  

I found an interesting article of Revit’s Blog Hub.  I am sharing the article to discuss: How Ongoing Innovations Have Made Revit More Automated Than Ever 

To participate in the discussion:  

• Write your comments, thoughts, and questions and feel free to agree or disagree of the ideas presented in the article. I would like to hear all kinds of feedback 😊  

Discussion Questions:  

1. What features of Revit do you wish were automated?  
2. Know that you know what features are automated, which one is most useful for you?  

We invite anyone to participate in these discussions and look forward to the conversations! 

[a-carpentier]

Something that should have been automated years ago is the ability to have views aligned across several sheets.

It's insane to think that such a simple tool has not been created yet, and that most people still have to draw reference lines on every sheet they use and then align the views one by one.

[BobbyC.Jones]

Since you posted in the API forum, I have a generalized API related suggestion.  If it can be done in the Revit UI, there should be an API for it.  The best way to automate Revit is to let your customers automate it for themselves.

If you'd like a concrete example, then I am working on a project to automate Design Option usage.  And the API around them, well, to be kind I'll just say, it leaves a lot to be desired.

[a-carpentier]

Yes, I fully agree with that! Everything that has a Get method should also have a Set method.

A good example of that would be the Viewport.GetLabelOutline method (returning the position of the label on sheet) but there is no Viewport.SetLabelOutline method so there is no way for us to move a viewport label through the API, even though it's very easy to do using the UI.

[Thommy_]

Discussion Questions:  

1. What features of Revit do you wish were automated?  

Dynamo is the best what could happen to the Revit community. With Dynamo many more Architects and engineers will learn programming soon. I hope the development of Dynamo will continue to make it faster and more stable.

My concern are the many different methods to access parameter and their values. Some parameters are language dependent, some have a built-in name, some have no guid and can only accessed by the ui Name, some cannot changed at all, some are managed by an external txt file, some cannot changed with the API, some are instance, some are types, etc. And all of them have to queried in a different way. It is really a mess to change parameters names or their values. I work atm on a translation project where we have to translate Parameter Names and their values in 200 models. Really complicated... And because of the different parameters and many different methods, it is really hard to let users in one company use different Revit UI languages (project independent). We are a international world with international offices, but Revit Parameters are still working as in the year 2000.

Maybe you don't notice this in the US or UK: Because of that language problems some Dynamo packages are not usable, because the nodes or scripts are using the ui language dependent parameter names. If someone in the community creates a script, you can be sure you have to rework the script, because of the mentioned problems.

In my opinion it is time to introduce a new era of parameters. All of the same structure and all with the same API methods. Parameters which all have a GUID and can have language dependent multi-field-values. They should be queried only by its guid and not by its human readable name. 

1. Know that you know what features are automated, which one is most useful for you?  

All of the new features are great in general - but they don't change the major automation problems of Revit.

Thanks for your article and the discussion,

Best,

Thomas