Order of Sheets printed

[Anonymous]

I'm sure we are all tired of moving sheets around in a PDF after printing our sets (move the General sheets to the top, then put the demo and site sheets in their orders, etc).  I have an add in that will create sheet sets for revisions, and I figured that I could use this to finally put the sheets in the order that I want them to print.  Alas the ViewSet.Insert() method seems to sort as it adds the sheets because the order in the ViewSet ends up different than the order that I insert the sheets (boo!).  O I am thinking there are 2 alternatives:

1. Create my own Sheet Number parameter and use it on my titleblock and use the Revit sheet Number BIP as a sequential print order
2. Create my own print routine and dialog that will use my own sheet lists rather than the ViewSheetSets that Revit stores for us (I'm thinking to use global parameters to allow these lists to be stored and accessed again).

Obviously 2 is far more work, but perhaps could work and provide a lot of flexibility that may not be present in Revit.  But before I start down this path I wanted to get input from the community.  Has anyone else come up with a solution for this?

[Anonymous]

The first option definitely works, but it means that the bookmarks as well as the project browser is affected.  The BIP is the one that is used as the primary key in the browser.  So all of your users must be willing to give up having that show up with the expected sheet number (say G-001, A-121, etc) and instead show a print order (I used AXXX numbered sequentially).

[jeremytammik]

Does @aricke59's answer to this thread help?

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/printing-to-a-custom-filename-when-creating-separate-...

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the link Jeremy.  It may provide a path forward, in itself though it looks like it deals with printing to separate files, while I'm trying to affect the page order when printing to a combined file.  But it's a new way of prodding the revit printing function that I have not explored . . . 

[Anonymous]

It occurs to me that allowing API access to ViewSet sorting (yes or no) is all that is needed.  If I could turn off sorting for my view sets then they would print as I wish them to.  Currently the Autodesk workaround is to export a cad format (dxf I think) and then use DesignReview to manually sort the pages and then print.  For jobs with alot of sheets (I have some that are 1000+ sheets) this is quite impossible, and manually sorting a pdf is just as bad (or nearly so).  This seems like a really easy thing to do, and to set up so that only through the API can this occur, so that the default behavior in the UI remains unchanged.  I would guess that there is a lot of extra coding in the ViewSet class to accomplish this sorting (or else is using a standard SortedList, but I think that is unlikely) and the sorting has been given to an arbitrary parameter.  I am really wondering what everyone in the community does about this, but from my own local polling it seems that living with the fact that you must resort the resulting PDF is the standard.  It's quite archaic.

[jeremytammik · Accepted solution]

If this is a request for a new feature, you should ensure there is a wish registered for it in the Revit Idea station.

[novesvalentin]

@Anonymous I found this old thread trying to do the print sort, but as you know there is no method for that.

Being that said I found a workaround, It turns out that the order in which the sheets are inserted and printed is not completely random, when you do a element collector of sheets to the Revit DB it provides the sheets in that exact same order so you can save the index in a variable and them sort them by name for example, then you can print and re arrange the sheets based on the saved index.

Hope this helps someone with the same problem

[andrell.laniewicz]

Is there a way to get the sheet order set in Revit to impact the sheet order when a file is uploaded to BIM 360 or ACC UP? It seems that sheets are uploading in the alphanumeric order regardless of what they are in Revit. Sheets is in Build, but not in the Revit file itself. This makes collaboration a challenge