Thursday, April 22, 2010

Revit API 2011: Revit AddIn Manager – Almost Edit & Continue

(part of our ongoing series)
If you’ve been developing for Revit for a while – you groaned significantly when, in Revit 2010, changes were made to Revit that disabled the “Edit-and-Continue” capability within a Revit add-in. That is to say – if you wanted to make a minor code change while Revit was debugging – you had to close Revit (wait for Revit to be totally closed), perform the change, then restart Revit, re-load your model, and then try to get back to the same location. Argh – seems like 2+ minutes down the drain any time this happens.

Enter the “Revit AddIn Manager” – part of the Software Development Kit. This tool has been around since 2009, I think – it historically provided handy mechanism for a developer to test External commands or applications – even when they forgot to add them to the REVIT.INI file. It could both update the INI file for you, or even just launch the command in session.

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What’s Different in 2011?

I suspect due to some conversations and posts that were had on Jeremy Tammik’s blog late in the development process, the AddIn Manager has been notably improved – such that while you can’t support edit-and-continue, you can now support updating your code while Revit is running, and just re-running your command inside of Revit.

How does this work? The Addin utility is doing some lifting behind the scenes, including copying the DLL and related files to a temporary folder, and loading the .NET assembly DLL from that location.

What does this mean for us? That when we start up Revit with the debugger attached, we can run the AddInManager. From the AddInManager we can launch our command in a way that loads it into memory before starting the debug process.

While we still cannot edit and continue, we CAN open a second copy of Visual Studio, and make changes by rebuilding the project.

- it allows us to overwrite the project, because the running project was copied to somewhere else.

- we are now able to just re-start the AddIn Manager in order to start our updated version of the command.

The Features of the AddIn Manager

The behind-the-scenes mechanics are described above. It also has (obviously) been enhanced to support the new “.addin file” mechanism rather than the Revit.INI mechanism of registering addins. The command also supports some additional options which can be a little confusing at first. The list of AddIn Manager commands looks like this:

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What’s the deal with all this manual, automatic and faceless?

The Manual vs. Automatic entries refer to the new TransactionMode and RegenerationMode that must be assiged to each command. Because the AddIn Manager is going to invoke your AddIn, it would be a problem if AddInManager specified Automatic mode but your code specified manual mode. So you have to pick automatic or manual based on what YOUR command is defined as. NOTE: No mix/match on transaction and regeneration mode… you have to be either Auto/Auto or Manual/Manual. The application will stop you if you pick the wrong one (although the error message leaves something to be desired).

Faceless, while the mechanism seems a little clumsy – is a nice little feature. Fundamentally – it remembers the last command that you executed, and will just execute that again (no user interface, it just does it – that way you don’t need to re-browse, re-select, and re-run the command in question).

Conclusion

If you occasionally work with API developers – get a copy of the AddIn Manager to make it easier to test and setup API AddIns! If you’re a developer, there are now many good reasons to set up the AddIn Manager. So get to it! It’s in the Revit SDK installation folder.

Revit 2011 API: What’s New in Element Creation

(part of our ongoing series)
Each new version, I go through what is new in the specific API area of element creation. Every CAD API has some logical divisions, from information retrieval, to element creation, to interactivity – and you can tell from how strong each area is what the factory’s focus is in the API.

Revit’s start in this area was weak – the API was more about finding elements and updating parameters than actually creating new elements and geometry. In recent releases, Revit really played catch up – I believe it now supports 101 different element creation methods.

So what’s new in 2011 in this area: in short, not much… This was not an area of focus in 2011, so there’s only a few new things in this specific area:

  1. NewTruss() – now available in architecture
  2. NewRebarType()
  3. NewRebarHookType()
  4. NewRebarCoverType()
  5. FaceWall.Create()

The last one is of the greatest interest to me personally. This enables you to create a wall based on a face (typically a face that is on a mass element). This is an advanced technique used in Revit to create complex wall shapes.

Two other items deserve honorable mention here as well:

  • UIDocument.PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement() – while not technically a “Element Creation” capability, it opens up some significant doors to more interactive design applications within Revit – by letting the end-user help the developer place the family instance visually.
  • SolidSolidCutUtils – A new utility class to help with doing solid-to-solid cuts in the modeling environment. This is typically used either for GenericForm kind of family solids or family instances.

All in all, while this category doesn’t seem like it got much attention in 2011, the fact is that with 101 element types that can be created, it has attained a certain level of maturity. For example, if I scan the Home ribbon in 2011 – it is possible to create almost everything that is available on that toolbar (I think the exceptions are: Ceiling, Model Group (you can’t create a new one), Railing, Ramp, Stairs. That’s really not too bad – and the remaining ones are a little on the obscure/complex side.

So let me hear from you by comments? Are you really waiting for one of the missing elements that can’t be created? or are you just reluctant to do API work with geometry creation until it supports 100%? How many different kinds of elements are YOU creating in your app?

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Revit 2011 API Series: RevitLookup: The New Name for RvtMgdDbg

(part of our ongoing series)
Since the beginning of Revit development time – in the 8.0/8.1 range, the best way to learn about what is possible with the Revit API was to use a “Snoop Tool” – something that could interrogate all of the elements in the model and all of their properties.

In the beginning, there was RevitDbg – a tool by Fenton Webb at Autodesk. It used reflection to browse through a massive tree structure of all the elements in the model. It was slow, but cool.

Later, Jim Awe of Autodesk brought his Snoop tool (called “RvtMgdDbg”) from AutoCAD to Revit – bringing not just browsing of elements but also event testing as well as some test commands. This became the tool that most Revit developers cut their teeth on. That said – I’m still amazed at the number of developers who have tried to learn the API without the benefit of RvtMgdDbg… I have to imagine it’s like developing in the dark!

For all of its importance to Revit developers, RvtMgdDbg was always somewhat of a step-child at Autodesk… No one really owned it (so it was nice that they provided the source – at least 3 times over the past few years I had to upgrade it myself to support the latest version before someone at Autodesk took care of it). It was also unclear over time how it was going to be distributed – was it only for ADN members? Did you have to attend a particular AU session? Or did you just have to know the right people? Thankfully, in the past year or so Autodesk has caught on to how important RvtMgdDbg is to getting developers up-to-speed and has made it available to anyone, usually via Jeremy Tammik’s blog.

Which brings us to 2011… While not revolutionary – it is an important evolution for RvtMgdDbg. It has been adopted by the Revit API team – which means that there are resources devoted to updating it and providing it along with the SDK – under a new, more accessible name: RevitLookup. Kevin Vandecar as well as some of the Shanghai developers have done yeoman’s work in upgrading it (it is a grueling task – I know because I had to do it myself at least twice during the 2011 alpha/beta cycle).

RevitLookup can be found in the SDK folder under RevitLookup – it appears that you’ll have to build it yourself (binaries were not shipped) – but it’s great to see that this tool getting its proper due from Autodesk.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Revit 2011 API: SDK Posted (a while ago)

We’re all still waiting anxiously for the official Revit 2011 product to become available… They set the expectation for today – but it’s not there yet! and it’s 7:58 AM! What’s the deal? :)

That said – I noticed last night that the final Revit 2011 SDK is available as a standalone download on the ADN page (posted back on 4/1 – and I didn’t notice).

In other news, I hope to get back onto posting the rest of my 2011 articles – I’m just temporarily buried in project work.

[Editor: And I can see that I have to go back and add to a few previously written articles. I can see at least 15 enhancements in the new SDK that were added late enough in the process that I was unaware of them! Woo-hoo, more toys!]