Programming access to .rvt files. how to ?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My team and I are working on a startup, as part of its functionality we are trying to understand if there is any way to extract specific quantities from an .rvt file without loading it on Revit.  

Using Revit it easy to extract from an existing project any takeoff information ( i.e wall area, floor area, number of doors per floor etc.. ), we try to understand if there is anyway to extract this data from an .rvt file without opening the software. We have a programming team on board so also if there is any way to convert an .rvt file to .txt or html that will contain all the take off info ( without doing that manually from Revit for every takeoff needed ) will help too. 

Any ideas and help is highly appreciated.

Thanks !

Eliran

[bhprest]

I don't believe its possible to achieve what you are trying to do outside of Revit with a stand-alone application. However, you may want to take a look at the Autodesk Forge API:

https://forge.autodesk.com/en/docs/model-derivative/v2/developers_guide/overview/

[Revitalizer]

Hi,

I didn't test this, but obviously, there may be third party access to both RFA and RVT files:

https://www.opendesign.com/products/bimrv

Revitalizer

[Kennan.Chen]

As mentioned above, opendesign did a fantastic job to provide you with an alternative to read or even write rvt and rfa files. But it just replaces Revit with another smaller sized software which is actually not that stable.

Think of it, Revit and opendesign tools are just parsers which read the encrypted data from a file and construct the extremely complicated data structure in memory. Is there anyone who understands the encrypted data better than Revit itself? So if you want to extract information from a revit model, Revit is not the only choice by currently the best choice.

You may consider to design an addin which exposes Revit API via HTTP or other protocols. Then you can open an instance of Revit and call the APIs from another process or another machine.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all so much !! its extremely helpful and we began working with this information.