AEC DevBlog

ADN wishes you a Merry Little Christmas.

By Jaime Rosales 

Hello everybody, I want to wish you a great week of holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Happy New Year. Don’t forget to submit your proposal for the Autodesk Cloud Accelerator program.

Please visit http://autodeskcloudaccelerator.com/ for more details.

Here I will leave you a little Christmas Tree to play around with it.

Cheers,

RevitAPI: Align 2 pipes through center lines

By Aaron Lu

A customer wants to use RevitAPI to align 2 pipes through their centerlines, I think it is feasible, here is what I plan to do:

1. Get center line geomerty objects from pipes via Element.get_Geometry()
2. Create the alignment via RevitDoc.Create.NewAlignment()

But however, I got an ArgumentException saying: One of the conditions for the inputs was not satisfied. Consult the documentation for requirements for each argument.

Headache...

With the help of Phil from development team in China, I made it work, the key point is that I should first move the pipe to align with the other physically. Just like what documentation says:

These references must be already geometrically aligned (this function will not force them to become aligned).

I did so, and it works, happy!

Here are the keys of the achievement:

1. Make sure geometry options's ComputeReferences property is set to true, this ensures we can get the reference of the geometry objects retrieved.
2. Make sure geometry options's IncludeNonVisibleObjects is set to true and View property is set to plan view, this ensures we can get the geometry of the hidden centerline.
3. Make sure the pipes are geometrically aligned, e.g. by calling ElementTransformUtils.MoveElement() method.

Here is the whole code:

//Assume the 2 pipes are parallel
//Assume the ActiveView is a plan view
private static Dimension
    Align2PipesViaCenterline(Pipe pipeBase, Pipe pipe)
{
    Dimension dimension = null;
    Document doc = pipeBase.Document;
    View view = doc.ActiveView;
    Line baseLine = GetCenterline(pipeBase);
    if (baseLine == null) return null;
    Line line = GetCenterline(pipe);
    if (line == null) return null;
    var clone = line.Clone();
    clone.MakeUnbound();
    IntersectionResult result = clone.Project(baseLine.Origin);
    if (result != null)
    {
        var point = result.XYZPoint;
        var translate = baseLine.Origin - point;
        using (Transaction transaction = new Transaction(doc))
        {
            try
            {
                transaction.Start("Align pipes");
                ElementTransformUtils.MoveElement(
                    doc, pipe.Id, translate);
                dimension = doc.Create.NewAlignment(view, 
                    baseLine.Reference, line.Reference);
                transaction.Commit();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Trace.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
                transaction.RollBack();
            }
        }
    }
    return dimension;
}

private static Line GetCenterline(Pipe pipe)
{
    Options options = new Options();
    options.ComputeReferences = true; //!!!
    options.IncludeNonVisibleObjects = true; //!!! 
    if (pipe.Document.ActiveView != null)
        options.View = pipe.Document.ActiveView;
    else
        options.DetailLevel = ViewDetailLevel.Fine;

    var geoElem = pipe.get_Geometry(options);
    foreach (var item in geoElem)
    {
        Line lineObj = item as Line;
        if (lineObj != null)
        {
            return lineObj;
        }
    }
    return null;
}

RevitAPI: Rebar.CreateFromCurves throws: Unable to create a RebarShape based on the given curves

By Aaron Lu

We knew that Rebar has several creation method overloads, CreateFromCurves is one of them,

public static Rebar CreateFromCurves(
    Document doc, RebarStyle style, RebarBarType barType, 
    RebarHookType startHook, RebarHookType endHook, Element host, 
    XYZ norm, IList<Curve> curves, 
    RebarHookOrientation startHookOrient, 
    RebarHookOrientation endHookOrient, 
    bool useExistingShapeIfPossible, bool createNewShape);

Let's take a look at argument norm and curves,

norm
    Type: XYZ
    The normal to the plane that the rebar curves lie on.

curves
    Type: IList<Curve>
    An array of curves that define the shape of the rebar curves. They must belong to the plane defined by the normal and origin. Bends and hooks should not be included in the array of curves. 

the RevitAPI.chm shows that the plane of the curves should be perpendicular to the normal.

A customer wants to create 2 rebars, and the plane of curves is truly perpendicular, but the fact is the first Rebar is created successfully, but the second one failed with an InvalidOperationException: Unable to create a RebarShape based on the given curves.

RebarBarType bartype = new FilteredElementCollector(RevitDoc)
    .OfClass(typeof(RebarBarType))
    .FirstOrDefault(t => t.Name == "8 HPB300") as RebarBarType;
Curve
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(5.656152019023, 43.5912980314625, -10.0065608637852),
    new XYZ(5.65615201724766, 43.5912980188303, 7.70997373826235));
curves.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(5.65615201724766, 43.5912980188303, 7.70997373826235), 
    new XYZ(5.65615201724766, 45.2478392340832, 7.70997373826235));
curves.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(5.65615201724766, 45.2478392340832, 7.70997373826235), 
    new XYZ(5.656152019023, 45.2478392467154, -10.0065608637852));
curves.Add(curve);

// Create succesfully!
Rebar.CreateFromCurves(RevitDoc, RebarStyle.Standard, bartype, null, 
    null, ele, nml, curves, RebarHookOrientation.Left, 
    RebarHookOrientation.Left, false, true);

// Problem Curves
List<Curve> curves2 = new List<Curve>();
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(6.22700217574493, 43.5110702844365, -10.0065608637852), 
    new XYZ(6.22700217219427, 43.5110702591722, 7.70997373826235));
curves2.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(6.22700217219427, 43.5110702591722, 7.70997373826235), 
    new XYZ(6.22700217219427, 45.1676114744251, 7.70997373826235));
curves2.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    new XYZ(6.22700217219427, 45.1676114744251, 7.70997373826235), 
    new XYZ(6.22700217574493, 45.1676114996894, -10.0065608637852));
curves2.Add(curve);
//InvalidOperationException thrown
//  => Unable to create a RebarShape based on the given curves
Rebar.CreateFromCurves(RevitDoc, RebarStyle.Standard, bartype, null, 
    null, ele, nml, curves2, RebarHookOrientation.Left, 
    RebarHookOrientation.Left, false, true);

Seems the code is almost the same for the second Rebar creation comparing to the first one except the point positions. But why it throws while the first one doesn't?

I could not find the answer either :-(

My colleague Grzegorz said:

The algorithm of creation of shape is quite complicated. Basically the problem can occur for shapes defined by segments (lines) forming RIGHT ANGLE between themselves. They have to be defined very precisely (different digits on 7 or 8 place after decimal separator can cause exception). The best solution for customer in this situation is to round all coordinates to 6 digits after decimal separator.

So I changed the code like this, then the exception has gone.

curve = Line.CreateBound(
    XYZ(6.22700217574493, 43.5110702844365, -10.0065608637852), 
    XYZ(6.22700217219427, 43.5110702591722, 7.70997373826235));
curves2.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    XYZ(6.22700217219427, 43.5110702591722, 7.70997373826235), 
    XYZ(6.22700217219427, 45.1676114744251, 7.70997373826235));
curves2.Add(curve);
curve = Line.CreateBound(
    XYZ(6.22700217219427, 45.1676114744251, 7.70997373826235), 
    XYZ(6.22700217574493, 45.1676114996894, -10.0065608637852));
curves2.Add(curve);

....

private XYZ XYZ(double x, double y, double z)
{
    return new XYZ(
        Math.Round(x, 6), Math.Round(y, 6), Math.Round(z, 6));
}

中文链接

AU Vegas and Retrieving Material and Bump Image Path

 

By Jaime Rosales

It’s been a week since AU 2014 happened and it was such a great experience. I got to meet really interesting people and many of our ADN partners which are doing pretty amazing things with our API’s.

I met clients like Cl3ver which have a pretty interesting Platform for 3D presentations and they have native Revit plug-in which will make your model available reducing it up to 10 times for a faster and smoother presentation.

Another one that caught my eye was HsbCAD which have a very interesting plug-in that breaks your model into small pieces and makes them 3D print available adding parts to then get put together like a 3D puzzle, very interesting work.

During the exhibition I got to help the A360 team booth which turned out to be a total success with more than 4K visitors during the 3 days and got so many started with their free year subscription of A360. Also had the chance to meet incredible evangelist from my team which showed me how the logistics of ADN work and I couldn’t be happier that I’m part of this team.

Jeremy Tammik rocking the A360 booth.

During DevDays, Philippe Leefsma and Jim Quanci rocked the stage showing the Viewer and Data API with over 400 happy attendees.

Got a lot of selfies with our customers since being part of the ADN target list of #selfiewith there were many enthusiastic guys and girls trying to get us for the chance of scoring one of the coolest smart watches we were giving away.

DevHack was also a great experience on Tuesday afternoon, where we had many of our API’s developers come by for a consultation and we got the chance to help them with their current development projects. It was such a great time to meet all of those great developers in person after helping them for quite some time I was able to finally put a face to their name.

Jim Quanci rocking DevDays Stage.

 

Now back to Revit API. During the past couple of weeks I looked over a case where a developer was trying to get the material appearance's and bump image path.

Here is the question.

Question: How can I use the Revit API to retrieve the material appearance's generic and bump image file path and name.

foreach (Element elem in collector) 
  { 
    Material mat = elem as Material; 
    AppearanceAssetElement ae = (AppearanceAssetElement)
      m_CurrentDocument.GetElement(mat.AppearanceAssetId); 
    Asset set = ae.GetRenderingAsset(); 
    ...... 
  } 

Answer: The asset has properties which are collections of name/value pairs.  So these paths should be a part of the properties. Unfortunately there is no set of predefined values for the names, so you will need to experiment looking at the properties and then decide if you want to hardcode the names you are looking for, or try to find them dynamically. 

(Sometimes the names change, and sometimes the available properties are different for different material types, so hard coding, while simplest, carries some possible risk).

I hope this helps, and let us know if you need more assistance from us.

Response: This is the code that I finally got it working.

void MyCommand(ExternalCommandData commandData) 
{ 
  string genericImage = ""; 
  string bumpImage = ""; 
  Element someElement = null; // have some material element here. 
 
  Material theMaterial = someElement as Material; 
  AppearanceAssetElement appearanceAsset = 
  (AppearanceAssetElement)commandData.Application.ActiveUIDocument.
                  Document.GetElement(theMaterial.AppearanceAssetId); 
  Asset asset1 = appearanceAsset.GetRenderingAsset(); 
  genericImage = GetAssetProperty(asset1, "generic_diffuse"); 
  bumpImage = GetAssetProperty(asset1, "generic_bump_map"); 
} 
 
private string GetAssetProperty(Asset asset1, string propertyName) 
{ 
  const string BitmapPropertyName = "unifiedbitmap_Bitmap"; 
  string theValue = ""; 
  if (asset1 != null) 
  { 
    AssetProperty property; 
    AssetPropertyString stringProperty; 
    AssetProperty property2; 
    for (int i = 0; i < asset1.Size; i++) 
    { 
      property = asset1[i]; 
      if (property != null && property.Name == propertyName) 
      { 
        IList<AssetProperty> propertiesConnected = 
              property.GetAllConnectedProperties(); 
 
      if (propertiesConnected != null 
          && propertiesConnected.Count > 0) 
      { 
        property2 = propertiesConnected[0]; 
        if (property2.Type == AssetPropertyType.APT_Asset) 
        { 
          Asset asset2 = property2 as Asset; 
          if (asset2 != null) 
          { 
            for (int i2 = 0; i2 < asset2.Size; i2++) 
            { 
              property = asset2[i2]; 
              if (property != null && property.Name 
                  == BitmapPropertyName) 
              { 
                 stringProperty = property 
                   as AssetPropertyString; 
                 if (stringProperty != null) 
                 { 
                   theValue = stringProperty.Value; 
                 } 
                 return theValue; 
              } 
            } 
          } 
        } 
       } 
//Once the named property was found,
//we wont search next. 
      break; 
      } 
 
    } 
  } 
  return ""; 
}

Here is a screenshot of the information that we will be retrieving.

Thank you Jeff Yao from Applied Software for providing such a great and useful solution.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

Types not supported by ElementClassFilter

By Aaron Lu

When we are using ElementClassFilter to filter elements, we may get this kind of Exception:

Autodesk.Revit.Exceptions.ArgumentException: Input type(Autodesk.Revit.DB.DetailLine) is of an element type that exists in the API, but not in Revit's native object model. Try using Autodesk.Revit.DB.CurveElement instead, and then postprocessing the results to find the elements of interest.

As the exception message suggested, we can use its base class to filter them, and then post process the result, let's see an example code:

var lineFilter = 
    new ElementClassFilter( typeof( CurveElement));
FilteredElementCollector filteredElements = 
    new FilteredElementCollector (familyDoc );
filteredElements = filteredElements.WherePasses( lineFilter);
foreach (CurveElement element in filteredElements )
{
    DetailLine detailLine = element as DetailLine;
    if ( detailLine != null)
    {
        var curv = detailLine .Location as LocationCurve;
        var lin = curv. Curve as Line;
        if ( lin != null)
        {
            // do what you like
        }
    }
}

After a short investigation, I found all of those Element derived types and their substitutions as for Revit 2015, see below list:

Structure.AreaReinforcementCurve	CurveElement
CurveByPoints	CurveElement
DetailCurve	CurveElement
DetailArc	CurveElement
DetailEllipse	CurveElement
DetailLine	CurveElement
DetailNurbSpline	CurveElement
ModelCurve	CurveElement
ModelArc	CurveElement
ModelEllipse	CurveElement
ModelHermiteSpline	CurveElement
ModelLine	CurveElement
ModelNurbSpline	CurveElement
SymbolicCurve	CurveElement
Architecture.Room	SpatialElement
Area	SpatialElement
Mechanical.Space	SpatialElement
Architecture.RoomTag	SpatialElementTag
AreaTag	SpatialElementTag
Mechanical.SpaceTag	SpatialElementTag
AnnotationSymbolType	FamilySymbol
AreaTagType	FamilySymbol
Architecture.RoomTagType	FamilySymbol
Mechanical.SpaceTagType	FamilySymbol
Structure.TrussType	FamilySymbol
AnnotationSymbol	FamilyInstance
Mullion	FamilyInstance
Panel	FamilyInstance
Architecture.Fascia	HostedSweep
Architecture.Gutter	HostedSweep
SlabEdge	HostedSweep
CombinableElement	a combination of GenericForm and GeomCombination

Note: A special case is Element, which can not be used either, one alternative I like is using LogicalOrFilter, example:

new LogicalOrFilter (new ElementIsElementTypeFilter( false), 
    new ElementIsElementTypeFilter (true ));

中文链接

RevitAPI: Those Exceptions

By Aaron Lu

In this post, I would like to collect some regular exceptions thrown from RevitAPI and try to find the reason and how to handle them.

ModificationOutsideTransactionException

First, let's see ModificationOutsideTransactionException, this is the shock for all beginners of RevitAPI.
It happens when we are trying to modify Revit model, for example,

RevitDoc.ProjectInformation.Author = "Aaron Lu";

The exception is thrown because we need to start a transaction before modifying and commit the transaction after.
So here it is how to do it properly:

Transaction transaction = 
    new Transaction(doc, "Change author of project");
transaction.Start();
try
{
    //update Revit model here
    RevitDoc.ProjectInformation.Author = "Aaron Lu";
    transaction.Commit();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    transaction.RollBack();
}

Why we need to do that?
The benifit is our operation needs to be tracked by Undo-Redo mechanism in Revit, that is to say, our operation will be appeared in the Undo/Redo list.

 

Autodesk.Revit.Exceptions.InvalidOperationException: The document is currently modifiable! Close the transaction before calling EditFamily

We can't include Document.EditFamily() method in transaction, because the EditFamily itself will start a new transaction internally! otherwise this exception will be thrown.

中文链接

Code formatting in TypePad blog

By Aaron Lu

It is a pain to insert code block in typepad blog, so I yahoo!ed (can't google in China :(), did not find much useful informaiton, fortunately the next day I searched again, yahoo! brought me to Jeremy's blog! There is a nice article describing how he handles it using VS plugin Copy As HTML for .net code and Google code prettify for Javascript.

Thanks, Jeremy!

"Copy As HTML"

Result:

Since typepad's post display width is fixed with 520px, we have to wrap code text if it is too long (more than 70 characters). But how should we know a line of code exceeds 70 characters quickly? I found a VS plugin for that:

Productivity Power Tools helps to add a column guide mark at any specific column:

If you think this tool is too heavy, you can modify VS's registry, this is how.

 

"Google code prettify"

Jeremy used the js file in typepad rather than from google site, but I found it still connects to googlecode.com to retrieve some .css files which is extremely slow in China, so I replaced most of google related URLs in "run_prettify.js" and uploaded it with some .css files to typepad,

I also changed the comment color in the prettify.css file from .com{color:#800} to .com{color:#008000} because it is more consistent with visual studio.

now the new script is here: http://adndevblog.typepad.com/files/run_prettify-3.js.

(I wonder whether there is any better free CDN site of which the speed is also good for China.)

so the code html node is this:

<script type="text/javascript" 
src="https://adndevblog.typepad.com/files/run_prettify-3.js"/></script>
<pre class="prettyprint">
    Your code here
</pre>

Result:

 google code prettify source download link

RevitAPI: How to get switch system from FamilyInstance?

By Aaron Lu

A customer asked how to create switch system, and how to know a FamilyInstance belongs to which switch systems. Unfortunately, we don't have API to create switch system and no workaround as far as I know. And no direct way to get switch systems of FamilyInstance like electrical system (i.e. FamilyInstance.MEPModel.ElectricalSystems). The good news is we have a workaround: filtering all switch systems and see if any switch system contains that family instance. Code example:

Element element = null; // the element to find switch system
var categoryFilter =
    new ElementCategoryFilter(BuiltInCategory.OST_SwitchSystem);
FilteredElementCollector mepSystems =
    new FilteredElementCollector(RevitDoc);
mepSystems = mepSystems
    .WherePasses(categoryFilter).OfClass(typeof(MEPSystem));
foreach (MEPSystem mepSystem in mepSystems)
{
    foreach (Element member in mepSystem.Elements)
    {
        if (member.Id == element.Id)
        {
            //found
            break;
        }
    }
}

Further questions:

1) Are MEPSystems always SwitchSystems or are there other types of MepSystems as well?
Answer: there are other types, MEPSystem is the base class of ElectricalSystem,MechanicalSystem and PipingSystem, that's why we need to use the combination of ElementClassFilter and ElementCategoryFilter.

2) Is it possible that an element in the MepSystem.Elements exists in another MepSystem as well? Or can an element only belong to one MepSystem?

Answer: An element can belong to multiple systems when it has multiple connectors used in different systems.

RevitAPI: How to get DWGExportOptions

By Aaron Lu

As we know we can export DWG from Revit, before exporting we can config some settings, question is how to access DWGExportOptions in Revit?

Since DWGExportOptions inherits from Element, we can use ElementFilter to filter it.

after that we can call ExportDWGSettings.GetDWGExportOptoins() to get the entry point of all information related with DWG export, below is the example code on how to find ExportDWGSettings and how to get its layers information:

var dwgSettingsFilter =
    new ElementClassFilter(typeof(ExportDWGSettings));
FilteredElementCollectorsettings =
    new FilteredElementCollector(RevitDoc);
settings = settings.WherePasses(dwgSettingsFilter);
foreach (ExportDWGSetting selement in settings)
{
    var options = element.GetDWGExportOptions();
    var layerTable = options.GetExportLayerTable();
    foreach (var layerItem in layerTable)
    {
        var layerInfo = layerItem.Value;
        if (layerInfo.CategoryType == LayerCategoryType.Model)
        {
            var modifiers = layerInfo.GetLayerModifiers();
            foreach (var modifier in modifiers)
            {
                // get modifier type
                var modifierType = modifier.ModifierType;
                // get separator
                var separater = modifier.Separator;
            }
        }
    }
}

中文链接