Insert Excel worksheets as Revit Schedules

I'm ve been away for a while, I've some news too.

Since October the 1st 2014 I'm part of the Autodesk Consulting AEC EMEA team, and I'm really happy! I'm sorrounded by very talented people and I'm learning everyday something new. Unfortunately I wasn't able to blog for a long time.

But anyway I'm here now and I want to share with you what I couldn.t over a year ago. During the first session in the very first RTC Europe in Delft, David Conant showed us a very interesting application of the new feature in Revit 2014, the highly customizable schedules!

Back at the time I had little knowledge of coding since I had just started the course by Harry Mattison of Boost Your BIM on Udemy, which by the way you should totally check out if you haven't yet.

I had time these days to test my understanding of how Revit API can work for me and made a little experiment to mimic what I saw at RTC, it's still a work in progress but I think it's been one of the highlights of that a RTC and shows pretty well what can be ddone if you just think out of the box, so my big thank you goes to David and Harry.

Here it is.

Auto Wall Schedule WIP - Code Sharing

For those of you who are interested in the code of the macro, you can find it here.
If you need a blank rvt file with all the tags I've used to run a "test drive" use this one.

For any questions, please  leave a comment below or contact me via email. if you are happy with my code you can show me some gratitude and PayWhatYouWant via PayPal at: 

puntorevit@gmail.com

Auto Wall Schedule - Views on Sheet

At this point I'm able to place the views created with the macro on a sheet accordingly to the type mark of each sample.
There is yet a lot to do to handle all the exceptions though. I'm concerned about the customization needed for each project when the title block has to change.
The material schedule on the right pane can be placed automatically and the family type of the main wall tag can be picked using the function parameter of the wall but still, it needs to be checked by the user.
As you can see from the video some material tag is filled with the correct value but the majority of them don't, I couldn't figure out why this is happening.

Any suggestion is really appreciated.

The floor macro is ready too as it has a very similar behavior to the wall one.

Auto Wall Schedule Macro - Work in progress

I've been developing a macro during the past week to automate some tedious tasks such as the wall types / floor types documentation.

I'm sharing a work in progress of the macro that shows how it works:

1. for each type in the project creates a sample and gives a type mark
2. creates a section view across the width of the sample
3. places a number of tags in the view (category tags, material tags)
4. creates parts and dimensions for each layer and for the overall width of the sample

There are a few things that I would like to address: material tags don't update correctly, there's still need for the user intervention even if it takes just a couple of nudges up and down, it shouldn't be necessary though; I wish I could use keynote material tags but it seems to be impossible to create Keynotes via API, somehow I've found a way to copy the Keynote values in the project to the material mark but there's need to select a keynote tag (it could be any user keynote, even with a random value) to trigger the process, so it's not a solution even if it gets the job done because it won't update automatically.
In addition to these tasks I'm thinking of placing the views automatically on sheets.

An interesting thing I learned this time is about a property of the geometry options, in fact I was struggling to obtain the references of the planar faces of the parts retrieved from the samples as solids.

If ComputeReferences is set to true in the geometry options it's possible to retrieve a valid reference that can be added to the ReferenceArray to be used to create dimensions.

Updates to follow, auto floor schedule too.

If anyone is interested in seeing the code as it is right now, please contact me at puntorevit@gmail.com