Automating workflows with third party software addins and dynamo

[steven.richter]

I have third party software installed on top of Revit (software is called Edge) that takes assemblies and creates sheets/ schedules and views, then combines them onto the sheet in preparation for annotation.  The issue is that I need to do this for several hundred assemblies, and the third party software can take upwards of 4 minutes to complete each sheet. This results in me waiting for the process to complete, then select a new assembly and re-initiate the 3rd party software function. Is there a way I can use macros or dynamo to automate this task a bit? I would like to provide a list of the assemblies I want to run the software on, then let it process all the assemblies overnight.

Any help is appreciated. 

Thanks!

Steven

[Viveka_CD]

Hi @steven.richter

Congratulations on earning the rank of an Explorer in the community! 

Revit already has an almost automated process for creating assembly sheets, views and schedules.

When you select a family (or building component) and create the assembly, there is an icon called 'Create Views'. This will show a window where you can select all possible views within a specific scale (3D Ortho, Plan, Sections, Elevations, Part List, Material takeoff, Schedules), and also select the titleblock family (size and type). All you have to do is to drag the views into the desired position.

Check this tutorial for step by step on creating Sheet and Schedules for Assemblies using Dynamo Revit

You could also import an Excel Spreadsheet into Dynamo and extract specific information - for example only two columns of information (sheet number and name) see HERE for dynamo code.

If you have specific questions let me know.

Please mark this response as "Accept as Solution" if it answers your question to benefit others looking for a similar solution. Kudos gladly accepted.

[steven.richter]

Viveka, 

Thank you for your reply. I understand the native workflow for creating assembly views and sheets within Revit. The workflow that I am looking for is being able to select multiple assemblies, and have views/ sheets/ schedules made for ALL of the assemblies. My current issue is there is a large amount of time spend just making the sheets/ views and schedules. The amount of assemblies per project can be upwards of 300, and it gets time consuming to create the content for all of them individually.

Ideally speaking, I would be able to select (using dynamo or something else) all of the assemblies that I wanted sheets/views/schedules created for, and have a script execute the function for all selected assemblies.

Hopefully this makes more sense as to what I am looking for. 

Thanks, 

Steven

[Viveka_CD]

Hi @steven.richter

Good to hear back! I understand that this is a time consuming process.We have the option of a generating qr codes for a huge list of assemblies in a project.

The code generator app can be downloaded HERE The QR codes can be named after your assemblies and you can 'save as' a csv format. There is a workflow of generating automatic sheets from excel to dynamo.Let me research more on this function and I can get back to you on this.