REvit 2017 API Wishlist - PLEASE

[JohnHenne]

Hi all,

Two items that I would love to see, and I know others are waiting for as well are:

1. Ability to determine which element(s) are which in a Schedule View. Currently, we create Door Schedules that contain any number of Door Elements. However, there is no way to determine which Element (by GuID) is which. Obviously Revit knows this information behind the scenes to allow for filtering/sorting/etc.., however, the only solution for the developer is: to first create a new parameter to store the Element GuID, then to add the parameter to the Schedule View, then to populate the parameter, and finally to delete the parameter from the Schedule View once you are done with whatever parsing you were doing.

----- I'm not sure why Element lookup was left out initially, but we need a way to obtain the Element GuID based upon a Schedule View row. Not sure what value the schedules actually have in industrial applications otherwise.

2. The ability to programmatically select "Itemize every instance" on the schedule Sorting/Grouping tab. Currently, if the Revit user has the schedule showing types and not instances, there is no way to have it show all instances programmatically.

Regards,

John

[jeremytammik]

Dear John,

Thank you for your two very pertinent requests.

I have some good and some bad news for you.

The bad is not really news: the time to submit wish list items for Revit 2017 is long past.

Most of the feature list for a new release of a desktop product on a yearly release cycle is determined well over a year before the release.

Regarding your wishes:

1. I am sorry to say that there is currently no API access to this functionality.

We have an existing wish list item REVIT-22038 [As an API user, I would like to be able to read the element ids associated to a given row or cell in a schedule, so that I can replicate the schedule in an offline tool and apply changes from the tool back into related Revit elements] for this functionality, which will require exploration and possibly a modification to our software. I added a note of your request to this item in order to make the development team aware of its importance. Please make a note of this number for future reference.

You are welcome to request an update on the status of this issue or to provide us with additional information at any time quoting this wish list item number.

This issue is important to me. What can I do to help?

This issue needs to be assessed by our engineering team, and prioritised against all of the other outstanding change requests. Any information that you can provide to influence this assessment will help. Please provide the following where possible:

• Impact on your application and/or your development.
• The number of users affected.
• The potential revenue impact to you.
• The potential revenue impact to Autodesk.
• Realistic timescale over which a fix would help you.
• In the case of a request for a new feature or a feature enhancement, please also provide detailed Use cases for the workflows that this change would address.

This information is extremely important. Our engineering team have limited resources, and so must focus their efforts on the highest impact items. We do understand that this will cause you delays and affect your development planning, and we appreciate your cooperation and patience.

2. I split this off into a separate, new, wish list item CF-4319 [API wish: programmatically select "Itemize every instance" in schedule Sorting/Grouping tab] to ensure that it is not missed in the largerr context of the first item.

For all interested readers, I just noticed this four-minute video demonstrating how to implement the workaround that you mention -- Revit -- Element ID in schedules using Dynamo:

https://youtu.be/U-tVoCYilxo

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Jeremy

[JohnHenne]

Sorry for my lack of knowledge of the interface, but I do not know how to gain access to the issse item CF-4319. Please direct me to the location to modifey the parameters of CF-4319.

[jeremytammik]

Dear John,

Sorry, you have no direct access yourself at all.

These development issues live in an internal database.

You will have to ask us for info or tell us what to add for you.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Jeremy

[michael_coffey]

For item #2 can't you use the ScheduleDefinition.IsItemized property and set to true?

[PaulusPresent_BB]

Dear Jeremy,

Regarding wishlist item REVIT-22038:

At our office 'Bureau Bouwtechniek' http://b-b.be/en/ we too have a need for the possibility to include the UniqueID of an element in view schedules.

We developed an addin to automatically export all our schedules at once whilst running various checks on them.

One of the checks involves looking for duplicate measurements (maybe a schedule was duplicated and forgotten during the model process). Typically we deal with more then a hundred schedules.

To incorporate the ID parameter for a duplicates check the addin process now involves:

1. (Re)inserting a binding for a self created shared ID parameter on all categories measured.

2. Storing of the UniqueID of all elements in their custom ID parameter.

3. Unlinking every linked revit document that also contains measured items.

4. Opening each linked rvt file separately and running step 1 to 2 and saving the linked file.

5. Reloading all rvt links in the main rvt document.

6. Adding the custom ID parameter column to all schedules.

7. Finally running the actual code to check for duplicates.

All this has to be accomplished in a worksharing environment with typically 3 to 4 persons working on the main model and linked models at the same time. Right now we have to ask users to sync&quit their local files temporarily to be able to read&write to all scheduled elements in the different models.

This is a real frustration, especially when a deadline is looming. Some of my colleagues Guy, Yoshi, Julie, ... are really annoyed about this. Julie even left office for a month to go on holiday to Brasil to blow off steam 🙂

I hope this helps to put this issue atop the prioritization list 😉 seriously

Kind regards,

Paulus

PS: Thanks for all the invaluable help your BuildingCoder blog is to us.