Exportation of structural analytical model to IFC file

[jorge.bslu]

Hi

I need to export structural analytical model to IFC, including typical analytical elements:

- Analytical Members

- Analytical Panels

- Boundary Conditions

- Load Cases

- Loads (point, line and area)

- Load Combinations

Is there any way to achieve that with the API?

If not, exportation to any other human readable format is also valid for me.

Regards

[jeremy_tammik]

Dear Jorge, 

I would be interested to hear your definition of a "human readable format". Do you include IFC in such a list? I consider myself human, and I would not consider an IFC file human readable. I need a computer program to handle it, or some other tool. Do you mean open-source, or non-proprietary?

What is your goal? Would you like to visualise the structural analytical model? You could query and traverse the structural analytical model data and visualise it by many means, including creating model lines and other geometry in your Revit model.

Cheers

Jeremy

[jorge.bslu]

Hi @jeremy_tammik 

Thank you very much for your assistance.

For me, human readable format is any file format I can read by using any text editor (e.g. Notepad, Notepad++, etc).

Ifc and IfcXml formats are human readable formats:

The discussion could be whether an ifc file is something that someone could easily understand ....

I don't need to visualize anything.

My goal is to export a Revit project into a text file in such a way that I can compare 2 of these text files to detect changes by a comparison tool.

I don't need to detect changes in the Revit project, the changes I want to detect are those from 2 subsequent exportations of our own model format to Revit (physical and analytical) though our Add-In.
In short, imagine yesterday I exported a steel portal frame and today I do the same and I want to check if there are changes or not in the exported columns, beams, materials, boundary conditions, loads, etc..
As far as I can see, the only "text" file that is possible to export from Revit is IFC and it does not include Analytical Model information.

I think I will have to implement my own serialization of analytical elements in order to compare exportation's output.
Regards
Jorge

[jeremy_tammik · Accepted solution]

> I think I will have to implement my own serialisation of analytical elements in order to compare exportation's output.

Yes, that is exactly what I was about to suggest. Thank you for explaining the use case. Also, more generically, The Building Coder discussed tracking changes to the BIM and reached a similar conclusion:

• https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/01/tracking-element-modification.html