Detect key press

[AGGilliam]

This is something that's come up a few times with my coworkers, that it would be nice to be able to place an element then press a key to rotate it so many degrees. After looking into it, it seems you can detect keys through a form or with some sort of hook but I was wondering if it were possible to attach this to Revit somehow.

I started trying to test this by grabbing the UIApplication.MainWindowHandle and using the user32.dll method to register a hotkey and overriding WndProc to perform a command, which was based on an example I found for doing this through Forms. I was able to register the key (as it stopped functioning until I closed Revit) but it still didn't seem to be able to detect it. I assume the WndProc method isn't going to work with anything other than a Form, but is there any other way to go about doing this within the Revit api?

[jeremytammik · Accepted solution]

The Revit API provides no support for keypress detection, so you will have to use the Windows API or .NET libraries for that:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=.net+keypress+event

Furthermore, if you do detect a key press, you may not be within a valid Revit API context to be able to interact with the Revit API.

If you are within a modal dialogue launched by an external command, you may have a valid Revit API context. 

If not, please refer to external events and co.:

https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/about-the-author.html#5.28

[AGGilliam]

It seemed like I was so close, but it's starting to look like this is a bit beyond my skill level. Thanks for the help!

[jeremytammik]

Yup, sorry, not quite so trivial... The Revit API is designed that way. There are reasons, mainly the paramount importance of the BIM integrity. Thank you for your appreciation.