History of Elements

[gprofile]

Is there a way in Revit to see the changes the elements has gone through. For eg: When a wall is created in Revit, the property of wall goes through many changes like the Base constraint or the type property, thickness of the wall etc. Eventhough the changes of the element property doesn't change the element ID,  I was wondering the element ID would record the history of the element and could be retrived, am I right? if so how could it be done.

Thanks.

[jeremytammik]

I am not aware of any built-in functionality to track element changes.

However, the Revit API provides two easy ways to be notified whenever an element is modified:

• The read-only DocumentChanged event triggered after the modification is complete
• The Dynamic Model Updater Framework DMU that enables you to react to the modification before it is complete

You can read more about them here:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/01/idling-dmu-documentchanged-and-need-for-regen.html

Everything you need to know about DMU is provided by The Building Coder corresponding topic group:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/about-the-author.html#5.31

If you wish to keep track of each individual database element modification, I think that both of these events are much too fine-grained from practical use.

They will also report changes to far too many elements, since each element modification may affect dozens or even thousands of other elements.

Therefore, I implemented a much more realistic system to track element modification, TrackChanges:

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

https://github.com/jeremytammik/TrackChanges

Later on, I started enhancing that for a more scalable cloud-based implementation, TrackChangesCloud:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/03/implementing-the-trackchangescloud-external-event.h...

https://github.com/jeremytammik/TrackChangesCloud

That should give you a good idea of what is possible.

Please keep us up to date with whatever you decide to do with this project.

Thank you.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[gprofile]

Hello Jeremy,

Thanks for your detailed explanation. I had this thought since we have to track the changes for the design changes in  every phase and highlight it for cost estimation.

with little knowledge of C#, I will give a try and let you know.

Cheers.