AEC DevBlog

Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon – Big Success

By Virupaksha Aithal

The Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon  – Big Success event is over. On behalf of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team I’d like to say a big “thank you” to all the publishers who has registered and submitted Apps to Autodesk exchange store. We have received more than 110 Apps as part of this event till date. Till september 30th, publishers can submit the Apps as part of this event.  Visit http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2014/08/an-online-event-with-an-opportunity-to-receive-up-to-us-100-per-app-published-and-win-one-of-eight-i.html

Recap 360 Drone 3D test and Weekend Hackathon.

By Jaime Rosales

This upcoming weekend I will be attending my first Hackathon and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Here is a link from our evangelist Jeremy Tammik that explains more in detail about Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon.

Some of the topics to be discuss are:

How to architect your Autodesk App Exchange application for the following platforms:

• AutoCAD
• Revit
• Inventor
• 3ds Max
• Maya

• Handling IPN notifications
• Implementing simple copy protection for your app
• Architecting your app to sell on monthly subscription
• Selling online web services on Exchange Apps
• Making use of Autodesk ‘cloud' services such as our new, web-based, zero-client 3D model viewer
• Sustainability apps

Head on over to exchangeapphack.com for details on the event, a FAQ, the schedule and speaker line up, Rules and Registration link.

If you want to know more about it head over to this link to find out about Preparation, System requirements, Hardware and Interactive Q&A of the Hackathon.

So as some of you already know, I have an amazing hobby that involves a Quad copter (Drone), a GoPro and a 3 year old excitement for new toys, and for some time I’ve been thinking about how making it more interesting with the awesome technologies that Autodesk have.

In my first post I showed you an aerial picture of the Autodesk Waltham office and this time using Recap 360 I created a 3D model of that office which I will show you here (Keep in mind that this is my first time using Recap 360 and also now I will pay more attention on what kind of pictures I need to take in order to have a better looking model hehe).

 

Nothing too fancy, but it is a little step to start doing some cool things with the use of these technologies and API’s. I heard from another ADN Evangelist about a group of enthusiastic guys who are starting to use Revit with their Drone. I will start investigating more about it and keep you guys posted.

Here is the link about the group of guys called Revit my Drone who came together for the first time on the AEC Hackathon this past weekend in Seattle,WA.

Thank you for reading, until next time.

Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon – update

By Virupaksha Aithal

Since we began the registration for Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon event, we received 145 registrations till date. We have received 74 Apps as part of the event. There is less than 3 days to the event. if you have not registered yet, visit Autodesk® Exchange Apps Hackathon http://exchangeapphack.com/

Discussions and presentations during the Hackathon include:

• How to architect your app for Autodesk Exchange?
• Developing cloud applications round table discussion
• Sustainability apps
• AutoCAD APIs roundtable discussion
• Advanced Exchange features – copy protection, IPN notifications, monthly subscriptions, selling web services
• Revit APIs roundtable discussion
• Max and Maya APIs round table discussion
• Inventor APIs round table discussion

for timing visit http://exchangeapphack.com/agenda/

Family instance joined ? and Guatemala Independence day!

By Jaime Rosales

As some of you might know I’m originally from Guatemala, and today we are celebrating 193 years of being Independent from the Spanish colonization. I will share you an aerial picture that I took at the beginning of August of one of the famous volcanoes that can be seen from the city of Guatemala and Antigua Guatemala.

Volcan de Agua – “Water Volcano”

Back to Revit. This time I will talk to you about a question that came from our Autodesk Forum, regarding the check for joined family instances.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api/is-family-instance-joined/m-p/5272857#M7228

Question: I can't see anything using RevitLookup but is there a way to tell if a family instance has been joined to something?

When transforming an edge I'm getting different results after joining the family to another family or a wall, etc.

Answer: I raised the question to our engineering team, and here is the response from one of them.

I think there are a couple of things to try:

1.) JoinGeometryUtils.GetJoinedElements()

For this one you could check out the post on Jeremy Tammik blog:

Getting Two Different Kinds of Joined Elements

2.) For concrete framing family instances and walls, you can get the Element’s Location, cast to LocationCurve, and look at ElementsAtJoin.

And for this 2nd suggestion you can look at this link.

Look for the post with title Wall Joins and Geometry.

There is also Element.GetGeneratingElementIds() which tells you for a given piece of geometry from an element what element causes this geometry to form.

Let us know how it goes, enjoy.

User Response: The first method worked for me.Thanks.

Thank you for reading, until next time.

ScheduleField HasTotal flag and New York Sunset

By Jaime Rosales

So fall is starting in New York City and the leaves are starting to get orange, the sweater weather is approaching and the sunsets keep being marvelous. Since it is Friday and close to the time for the weekend to start we will keep this post short. But before I show you some Revit API tips let me share you a picture I took with my drone and GoPro of a breath taking sunset of the NYC Skyline.

 

 

Back to Revit, this time the question came from one of our ADN members.

Question:I have programmatically created a schedule, added department, count, area and grouped by department. When itemizing the group, it shows each room and its area, but when I turn the itemization off, the summed areas is blank (the count works correctly). If I manually (using the Revit interface) go into the schedule, in the format menu, I can choose area and check the box that says ‘Calculate totals’, which then gives me the correct sum of the areas of the department like I want to.

My question is: How can we modify the field format via API to choose Calculate totals = true on a field?

Answer: Using ScheduleField.HasTotals Property will be the best thing to do here. This property indicates if the field displays totals. And it will give you True if the field displays totals, False otherwise.

ADN Member Response: Thank you!!! That did the trick!

Nothing like successfully helping another fellow API developer.

Thank you for reading, until next time.

 

PS. I loved the Apple presentation, looking forward to check the Apple Watch once it comes out.

Draw Text Graphics

By Xiaodong Liang

I do not see Navisworks 2015 API has not yet exposed the ability to draw text with Renderplugin and ToolPlugin. This reminds me of the workaround I shared with my colleague Miro in consulting team early this year.

We can draw the text ourselves. The challenge is to get the strokes of the text. Fortunately, Windows API provides something: FormattedText, PathGeometry etc , by which, I drew the text as below. Not too bad, isn’t it? 

By different Font (typeface), the strokes would be much different. So to have the simplest scenario, I use TXT in which most strokes are polyline only (at least for the alphanumeric and some basic letters). If using other Font, you will have to handle the scenarios of arc, even poly bezier etc.

There will be more works ahead, to make the text appearing nicely according to your requirement, but this demo could be a start. Of course, if API exposes text graphics, that will be much nicer.

  

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;


using System.Drawing;

using System.Windows.Media;

using System.Globalization;

using System.Windows;





using Autodesk.Navisworks.Api;

using Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Plugins;

namespace navisdrawtext {
 //tool plugin which draws custom text

 [Plugin("ToolPluginCustomText", "ADSK")]

 public class ToolPluginTest: ToolPlugin

 {

  ModelItem clickedModel = null;

  int mouse_click_x;

  int mouse_click_y;





  public override bool MouseDown(View view,

   KeyModifiers modifiers,

   ushort button,

   int x,

   int y,

   double timeOffset)

  {

   // get current selection

   PickItemResult itemResult =

    view.PickItemFromPoint(x, y);

   if (itemResult != null)

   {

    clickedModel =

     itemResult.ModelItem;

    Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Application.ActiveDocument.ActiveView.

    RequestDelayedRedraw(ViewRedrawRequests.Render);



    mouse_click_x = x;

    mouse_click_y = y;

   }

   return false;

  }





  //2014：

  //public override void OverlayRenderWindow(View view, Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Graphics graphics)

  //2015 :

  public override void OverlayRender(View view, Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Graphics graphics)

  {

   if (clickedModel != null)

   {

    //red color

    graphics.Color(Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Color.Red, 0.7);



    // Create the formatted text based on the properties set.

    FormattedText formattedText = new FormattedText(

     "Hello 12345678 :-)",

     CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-us"),

     System.Windows.FlowDirection.LeftToRight,

     new Typeface("Txt"), 30,

     System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Black

    );



    Geometry geo = formattedText.BuildGeometry(new System.Windows.Point(mouse_click_x, mouse_click_y));

    PathGeometry pathgeo = geo.GetOutlinedPathGeometry();

    PathFigureCollection pathfigcoll = pathgeo.Figures;



    //draw the text with the paths one by one, simply connecting the points by line.

    //please search more elegant ways on internet.

    foreach(PathFigure pathfig in pathfigcoll)

    {

     foreach(PathSegment seg in pathfig.Segments)

     {



      if (seg is LineSegment)

      {

       LineSegment lineseg = seg as LineSegment;

      } else if (seg is PolyLineSegment)

      {

       PolyLineSegment polyline = seg as PolyLineSegment;

       for (int i = 0; i < polyline.Points.Count - 1; i++)

       {

        int base_y = mouse_click_y;

        double actual_y_1 = 2 * base_y - polyline.Points[i].Y;

        double actual_y_2 = 2 * base_y - polyline.Points[i + 1].Y;



        graphics.Line(new Point2D(polyline.Points[i].X, actual_y_1),

         new Point2D(polyline.Points[i + 1].X, actual_y_2));



       }



      } else if (seg is PolyBezierSegment)

      {

       PolyBezierSegment polyBseg = seg as PolyBezierSegment;

       for (int i = 0; i < polyBseg.Points.Count - 1; i++)

       {

        int base_y = mouse_click_y;

        double actual_y_1 = 2 * base_y - polyBseg.Points[i].Y;

        double actual_y_2 = 2 * base_y - polyBseg.Points[i + 1].Y;



        graphics.Line(new Point2D(polyBseg.Points[i].X, actual_y_1),

         new Point2D(polyBseg.Points[i + 1].X, actual_y_2));



       }



      }





     }



    }

   }

  }



 }



 // plugin that enables tool plugin

 [Plugin("EnableToolPluginCustomText", "ADSK",

  DisplayName = "EnableToolPluginCustomText")]

 public class EnableToolPluginExample: AddInPlugin

 {

  static bool enable = false;

  public override int Execute(params string[] parameters)

  {

   if (enable)

   {

    //switch to the native tool

    Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Application.MainDocument.Tool.Value = Tool.Select;

   } else

   {

    //switch to custom tool

    ToolPluginRecord toolPluginRecord =

     (ToolPluginRecord) Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Application.Plugins.FindPlugin(

      "ToolPluginCustomText.ADSK");

    Autodesk.Navisworks.Api.Application.MainDocument.Tool.

    SetCustomToolPlugin(toolPluginRecord.LoadPlugin());

   }

   enable = !enable;

   return 0;

  }

 }
}

Keynote Table Reload and Happy iPhone day!

By Jaime Rosales 

So it’s here, the day that all of you Apple lovers (including myself) have been waiting for (again for another year). The announcement of a new mobile device it is only a couple of hours away and rumors says that a possible iWatch will be announced as well. Let’s see if Jony Ive’s quote “Switzerland is in trouble” will fulfill our expectations of a good watch. Here is a list of Apple Event Essentials to follow.

 

Back to Revit. Today’s post came from the Autodesk forum, and it is regarding the use of a new class implemented in the 2015 SDK.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api/keybasedtreeentrytable-reload/td-p/5251297

Question: I am trying to create a simple button that reloads the Keynotes file. Not sure how to code it as I have not coded in Revit. I did my first Revit plugin, but I am not sure how to call this function.       

KeyBasedTreeEntryTable.Reload();

I take I need better understanding of the public result execute.

thanks

public Result Execute(
    ExternalCommandData commandData,
    ref string message,
    ElementSet elements)
{
  //Get application and document objects
  UIApplication uiApp = commandData.Application;
  Document doc = uiApp.ActiveUIDocument.Document;
  KeyBasedTreeEntryTable.Reload();
  return Result.Succeeded;
}

Unfortunately the way the reload function is being used there will not be the correct one.

The answer came from one of our great Revit Engineers.

Answer: If what you want  is just to reload the keynote table from its current location, you should:

1.) Call KeynoteTable.GetKeynoteTable(Document doc). This is a static function which will get you the document's keynote table. (You will need to pass in the current document as an argument.)

2.) Then you can call Reload() on the keynote table object.

If you want to reload the keynote table from a different location, you should call LoadFrom instead. That function takes in an ExternalResourceReference argument. If you want to load the table from a normal file on disk, you can create an ExternalResourceReference via ExternalResourceReference.CreateLocalResource.

Here is a snippet of code simply showing the 2 steps from the answer above on how to use the reload function from its current location on a command call, nothing too fancy.

public Result Execute(
  ExternalCommandData commandData,
  ref string message,
  ElementSet elements)
{
    UIApplication uiapp = commandData.Application;
    UIDocument uidoc = uiapp.ActiveUIDocument;
    Application app = uiapp.Application;
    Document doc = uidoc.Document;
 
    Transaction tr = new Transaction(doc, "Reload");
    tr.Start();
 
    KeynoteTable.GetKeynoteTable(doc).Reload(null);
 
    tr.Commit();
    return Result.Succeeded;
}

Thanks for reading, until next time.

DefinitionGroup Set Name and Iceland Blue Lagoon

By Jaime Rosales

After a short week, Friday is here, and I want to take the opportunity for wishing all  of you a very relaxing first weekend of September, enjoy your activities and recharge those batteries for next week. I had an amazing trip for my honeymoon and still have my batteries fully recharged, how can I not, just check it out where I got mine like that.

Blue Lagoon, Iceland.

Back to Revit.

Will keep this post short since it’s Friday. Here is a snippet of code that I got from one of our Revit Engineers regarding the DefinitionGroup setting of its name. Unfortunately what one of our customers needed was to rename the name on the DefinitionGroup but since it’s a read-only property, that couldn’t be approached. 

Here I share the code for you to try it. Enjoy!

public static DefinitionGroup GetOrCreateSharedParamsGroup
  (DefinitionFile defFile, string grpName)
{
  try // generic
  {
   DefinitionGroup defGrp = defFile.Groups.get_Item(grpName);
   if (null == defGrp) defGrp = defFile.Groups.Create(grpName);
   return defGrp;
  }
  catch (Exception ex)
  {
   MessageBox.Show(string.Format("ERROR: Failed to get or
            create Shared Params Group: {0}", ex.Message));
   return null;
  }
}

Thank you for reading. Have a great weekend.

Get Value from App.config file and Sur la France

By Jaime Rosales

After a great end of August, where the wedding was a total success, I now have a gorgeous wife for the rest of my life, the honeymoon vacation was incredible, the culinary experience in Iceland and France was unforgettable, I’m now back as a married man, wiser on the wine culture of France and 100 times more in love with black truffles. My batteries have fully recharged and I’m excited to be back.

The question this time came from our Autodesk Forum.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api/get-value-from-app-config-file/m-p/5244679#M7119

Question: I am trying set up my addin to read folder name and path from app.config file.using:

ConfigurationManager.AppSettings 

to get the value. This is giving me an error.

[Transaction(TransactionMode.Manual)]
public class Command : IExternalCommand
{
  public Result Execute(
    ExternalCommandData commandData,
    ref string message,
    ElementSet elements)
  {
    UIApplication uiapp = commandData.Application;
    UIDocument uidoc = uiapp.ActiveUIDocument;
    Application app = uiapp.Application;
    Document doc = uidoc.Document;
 
    string dir = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["pdfOutput"];
    TaskDialog.Show(dir, dir);
     
    return Result.Succeeded;
  }
}

Here is the XML file:

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <sectionGroupname="userSettings"type="System.Configuration.
                       UserSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, 
	       Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" >
      <sectionname="BabuRevitAPI.HCL"type="System.Configuration.
   ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, 
   Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"
  allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser"requirePermission="false" />
      <sectionname="BabuRevitAPI.Settings"type="System.Configuration.
           ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, 
   Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"
  allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser"requirePermission="false" />
      </sectionGroup>
    </configSections>
  <userSettings>
    <BabuRevitAPI.HCL>
      <settingname="pdfOutput"serializeAs="String">
        <value>pdf outt put folder</value>
        </setting>
        <settingname="auslocal"serializeAs="String">
          <value>aus local folder</value>
          </setting>
          <settingname="test"serializeAs="String">
            <value>I am a test</value>
            </setting>
          </BabuRevitAPI.HCL>
  </userSettings>
</configuration>

Error Image after using above code.

Answer: There is a couple of steps we need to follow in order to solve this and not get our value = null like it’s happening in this case. Here is a snippet of code that came from one of our evangelists Augusto Goncalves. Where we have to keep in mind that the config file needs to be at the same location and with the exact name as the DLL of our addin. This needs to be taken into consideration other than that the value will be null since it will be reading the AppSettings Keys from the Revit.exe.config file where the 4 existing keys will not match our custom one.

[Transaction(TransactionMode.Manual)]
public class Command : IExternalCommand
{
  public Result Execute(
    ExternalCommandData commandData,
    ref string message,
    ElementSet elements)
  {
    UIApplication uiapp = commandData.Application;
    UIDocument uidoc = uiapp.ActiveUIDocument;
    Application app = uiapp.Application;
    Document doc = uidoc.Document;
 
    Configuration config = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration
        (System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);
    string value = config.AppSettings.Settings["pdfOutput"].Value;
    TaskDialog.Show("App config Value", value);
  
    return Result.Succeeded;
  }
}

Here is the .config file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="pdfOutput" value="Yes, I'm Working"/>
  </appSettings>
</configuration>

As you notice the code in the answer is much simpler but keep in mind that is just for testing purposes.

Here is how the name should be placed at the location where our addin files gets installed.

 

After that is completed. Voilà!

 

Thank you for reading, until next time.