What Type of Element is this? It depends...

(Sorry for the long interruption in blogging - project work was just too heavy to devote time to blogging).





I ran into something interesting yesterday that I had not seen before, and I figured it was worthy of a quick blog post. When doing Revit-oriented development, there are a lot of times when you check the type of an element, and have logic in place to handle that element based on the type.





I was running an application that I had tested before in the past - but it was no longer working - why? And then I stumbled upon an interesting quirk about Revit Architecture versus Revit MEP - something that I had never encountered before:



For certain types such as Pipe, when you ask Revit what type it is - the answer depends on which flavor of Revit you are using. In the sample above, I was interrogating a pipe element. In Revit MEP, it tells you it is a Pipe. BUT - with the same model in Revit Architecture - it tells you that it is an "Element" (Revit's code word for generic elements that don't have any special definition).

The element's category is consistently reported as "Pipes" - but this is just the first time I've ever noticed the type of object being different based on which flavor of Revit you're in. It makes sense that Revit behaves this way - if it did not, you would be exposing a variety of properties and methods for this type of object which should only be available in MEP.

In any case - just be aware - the code that you have that works perfectly one way in MEP could work completely differently in Revit Architecture (and I'm sure this is not the only scenario).