Revit API Documentation Online

[Anonymous]

Since Google doesn't seem too excited to index my 60k+ page website,  I wanted to share it here so people can find it and hopefully use it! : )

It currently includes the full official documentation (from the CHM file) for APIS 2015, 2016, and 2017.

www.revitapidocs.com

[jeremytammik]

Fantastic!

Congratulations!

A beautiful and extremely useful piece of work!

I note on typo in the top menu bar: the '2017' entry is marked as '2016', so '2016' occurs twice.

Thank you very much for this!

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

Thanks @jeremytammik

It was a lot of planning/work, but came together faster and better than I expected.

Thanks for poiting out the typo, I already pushed a patch (it was introcuced this morning when I added the new Python tab.)

Please let me know if you have any more feedback

Also, I pasted some content from your blog (What's new in the 20XX API), I hope that's ok with you. Let me know otherwise.

[jeremytammik]

Dear @Anonymous,

Thank you for the fix.

I'll mention it on The Building Coder tomorrow.

I also have individual requests from other developers thinking about working on this.

I need to tell them you already did it.

Is the source code for this project available online somewhere?

Would you like to open it up to collaborators?

Have you considered publishing it via GitHub pages?

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

Hi @jeremytammik

The code is on github.
Project is definately open to collaborators.

It needs +code docs, +test coverage, and can probably be improved and optimized significantly by more seasoned web developers.

https://github.com/gtalarico/revitapidocs

Regarding github pages, it could probably be done, but i haven't used it myself, so I don't know the limitations.

Here are some of the challenges and constraints:

1. Namespace Menu:

Each API/year has an index with around 20K nested entries,  sometimes many levels deep.

Performance can get tricky, and so is creating a good and responsive UI for browsing it, which is why I wanted it  to be collapsible.

If I recall correctly, Readthedocs for instance, limits the depth of the menu

2. Content

The content I had access to (.html files extracted from chm) were not pretty, so I had to do some unusual CSS overrides and eventually batch processed the 60k+ html files to remove unecessary JS and html code to make the pages look good and performa wall. I was also was concerned about appearance to google crawler (cleaned code, and added schema.org structured data on every page)

3. Performance.

The namespace html file alone was almost 3MB and 140K lines of html code, which is not good.

To optimize it, I am serving the menu as a json asynchronously, so it loads while the rest of the content is built, and can be cached.

4. Built in search

I originally tried using google custom search, but google can take a long time to index it (if it happens at all - 60k+ pages) 

Even with a full sitemap, it will probably just take time, but I didn't want to wait.

So I replaced the Google Custom Search box, with my own custom search.

I tried a JS server side search, similar to what git pages has, but it was crashing the browser (remember namespace is +100K lines), 

so I ended up pushing it server side which makes it reasonably fast: http://www.revitapidocs.com/2015/search?query=viewschedule

[jeremytammik]

Dear @Anonymous,

Thank you for the update and background information.

I published it on The Building Coder to maximise awareness:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/08/online-revit-api-docs-and-convex-hull.html

I hope you find numerous collaborators for this worthwhile undertaking!

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

hi @jeremytammik

Thanks for writing that up. 

Since I obviously can't write in English, would you mind making these 2 edits:

60k+ html files to remove unecessary unnecessary JS and html code to make the pages look good and performa wall perform well

I tried a JS server client side search, similar to what git pages has, but it was crashing the browser

[jeremytammik]

Sure thing.

Done:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/08/online-revit-api-docs-and-convex-hull.html#2.1

Cheers,

Jeremy

[arif.hanif]

@Anonymous awesome job, just getting back from vacation my self. I will dig into this project looks like a real good start. 

Thanks for all the hard work and making it open source.

[MGO-Norsyn]

Awesome!