Announcements
Welcome to the Revit Ideas Board! Before posting, please read the helpful tips here. Thank you for your Ideas!
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Add In Manager

Add In Manager

ribbon.pngIn the Revit Options there should be a better way to manage addins.  Similar to microsoft office products, they would still be able to still exist but be turned off or on.  

12 Comments
krzystoff
Advocate

I would also suggest being able to remove them from the same dialog -- many 3rd party authors don't write working uninstall scripts for their addons, and once installed they remain until the Windows profile is created or the program is reinstalled.

informatique
Contributor

A must have !!

Dealing with addins can be cumbersome.

While working on a project we can use many addins that a really valuable, but it can be overwhelming when you have to deal with many different menus. And above all we don't need them all all the time. I may use addins A, B, C and D. but I use A once or two during the time of the project.

So this addin manager is definitely needed.

 

THANK YOU KIND DEVELOPPERS !!

aking-watg
Participant

100% Please consider!

 

Dealing with conflicting add-ins is an all-too-common occurrence and regularly results in users blaming Revit (or in a recent case, BIM 360). In these instances, Autodesk did nothing wrong but the user is blaming your software anyway.

 

Considering the growing number of add-ins that users want on their machines, it would be helpful to allow for a minimalist approach. For example, a user may want an add-in that they only use once a month. It would be great if that add-in was generally unloaded but they could go into an add-in manager and enable it for the rare instances that they need it.

 

It seems Stantec went so far as to create a utility of their own. https://www.stantec.com/en/ideas/content/blog/2016/creating-a-safe-mode-for-revit Still, I would like to see this functionality built directly into Revit.

 

/AK

siyu.guoX8L2Z
Autodesk

Hi Revit users,
I hope everything is well with you!

I'm a product owner of a Revit development team and we're very interested in this topic and want to know more about it.

I want to invite any of you for user research to get your thoughts & suggestions about the Add-In Manager.
If you are willing to share some thoughts with us, please send me a private message (including your email address), then I'll follow up with you by sending out the formal research invitation.
Thank you!

mcoquereau
Enthusiast

My...

No more votes for this idea since 2018? I guess BIM managers are too busy managing the effects of a missing plugin manager to vote here!

 

Considering Revit relies heavily on external tools to do very very very basic stuff (like, until very recently, a decent pdf printing tool. I won't say more, you get the point), they should at least care to ease the heavy troubleshooting process these add-ins often require.

 

Just as @aking-watg mentioned, the blame often falls on the Revit team when things go wrong (which is not entirely false).

 

Thanks

 

DZimmerKVJT2
Enthusiast

Ideally, disabling add-ins would not be required to get other add-ins to work. Or better yet, no add-ins would be required, but I'm not so naïve as to expect that. But we should not need so many to do basic tasks.

In the mean time, we must install an app to manage the apps.

However, there are only two apps available to manage the many add-ins. But they have VERY limited functionality. 

Consequentially, the only benefit they provide is informing me where the add-in files are so I can manually disable them ONE BY ONE.

I found that there are literally DOZENS of add-ins running on my machine. AFAIK, only ONE add-in was manually added it's possible IT added some before I started at my current job only 3 months ago and they supposedly re-installed my Autodesk products then.

I have Revit 2019 thru R2024 on my computer and need all of them. That means that each add-in shows up several times.

So at the core of the issue (from my perspective): 

Why are so many add-ins required, and WHERE do they all come from? I only recognize a few. 

 

IF an add-in manager is added, will it function in older versions of Revit, like 2021, 2022, etc.? 

 

My current project uses R22, but we use R21 thru R24 regularly. 

 

I am worried that Dynamo will become virtually unusable, because it requires a complicated and tedious dance of removing/disabling add-ins, updating or downgrading packages with custom nodes. I have virtually no experience with programing and have found that some basic Python knowledge is required to operate Dynamo. 

With all that whining over, most of the problem is mitigated by the fact there is such an active and knowledgeable community in the forums to help people through there issues. 

 

Edit: the add-in managers cannot disable any of the add-ins. In the DiRoots one, they area all greyed out (except for Dynamo, Ironically). 

In the Stantec version, it gives me an error message for each add-in, saying that it cannot rename the file (see attached snipped photo)

 

add-in manager.JPG

Status changed to: Accepted

Congrats! We think this is a great idea, so we've decided to add it to our roadmap. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

To follow the progress of features in development, please see the Revit Public Roadmap and join the Revit Preview Release to participate in feature testing. (Note that Accepted Ideas may not be immediately available.)

 

The Factory

acatonHL59J
Contributor

I'd love to see an options screen on load-up of a new instance of Revit that allows us to select the add-ins we want to load. I don't always need, for instance, an excel uploader for general drafting, or a conduit analyzer when creating a sheets package.  Loading every single add-in every single time we open Revit bogs down the load process. 

this ability would also help greatly when troubleshooting to see if a specific add-in is causing troubles.

Tags (3)
Status changed to: Implemented

We are pleased to say that this has been implemented in Revit 2025.3! Thank you for your contribution to improving Revit!

Help | Add-Ins Manager | Autodesk

 

 -The Factory

DZimmerKVJT2
Enthusiast

@kimberly_fuhrman-jones

This is great I think it's important that we appreciate and celebrate when things work out

@DZimmerKVJT2 , Agreed!

aking-watg
Participant

Yes, thank you! It was fun to be included I the process and our office is looking forward to utilizing the new Revit Add-Ins Manager. Nice work!

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Submit Idea  

Autodesk Design & Make Report