Manipulate Ribbon after application startup

[CaoduroC]

Good morning,

I saw different examples of addin that are able to add buttons to the ribbon after the application is already running. One of them is Orkestra for example. 
it would be interesting to understand how to interact with the application to be able to create button on the fly if required...

[ricaun]

It's not a good idea to change/add buttons on the fly.

But...

On the OnStartup you could save the UIControlledApplication and get using static on some command to control the adding/removing panels buttons and stuff.

using Autodesk.Revit.UI;

class App : IExternalApplication
{
    public static UIControlledApplication UIControlledApplication()
    {
        return app;
    }

    private static UIControlledApplication app;

    public Result OnStartup(UIControlledApplication application)
    {
        app = application;
        return Result.Succeeded;
    }

    public Result OnShutdown(UIControlledApplication application)
    {
        return Result.Succeeded;
    }
}

Using this on some command/service.

var application = App.UIControlledApplication();

One problem to add some buttons on the fly:

• Revit does not add the button on the shortcut.

A better approach is to add the button on the start and hide the button and only show when needed.

See yaa!

[Kennan.Chen]

You'll need to use the undocumented lower level APIs in AdWindows.dll to manipulate the ribbon items directly

[Kennan.Chen · Accepted solution]

Reference AdWindows.dll, and use Autodesk.Windows.ComponentManager.Ribbon to create/read/update/delete all the RibbonTabs, RibbonPanels and RibbonItems