run a program from outside of Revit

[avpBS7DE]

Dear Revitiers,

I use Revit 2021 API, and I have crated a few External Commands, and External Applications. They all live and run from within Revit.

Now I want to create an executable that uses the RevitAPI.dll to modify a bunch of projects (.rvt) - when Revit is off.

What are my options ?

[ricaun]

I believe the option is Design Automation for Revit using Forge.

• https://forge.autodesk.com/en/docs/design-automation/v3/developers_guide/overview/#design-automation...

I have seen some users use Design Automation to test Revit plugins without open Revit.exe

[perry.swoboda]

We used RevitBatchProcessor to update a few fields in files before.  It works by running a script and starting Revit to run it.
https://github.com/bvn-architecture/RevitBatchProcessor

[rhanzlick]

I think this task/capability has been hotly sought-after for a long time (at least since I have been using Revit circa 2015). I have seen some seemingly nice solutions proposed over the years. Some of the best seem to be to open a session of revit, and allow your script to subscribe to the idling event. This can trigger opening/closing new documents and any other addin capabilities (like data export to databases). Just pre-allocate the project paths in a list that will be read from through a loop and it should work in theory. However, I don't think this functionality is exactly supported by autodesk, so results may vary.

As ricaun mentioned, I think the Autodesk-sanctioned way (especially recently) is to automate your workflow through Forge. I don't know much about forge, but from my understanding... that is one of the main reasons of going to the cloud (being able to batch-process over multiple models).

[ricaun]

I use this solution to make some tests on my application.

• https://github.com/geberit/Revit.TestRunner

You could run some scripts to open some files and change stuff, but you still need Revit installed on the computer.