Family Management Utils - Linked Family Browser

I'm in New York on vacation these days, and the jet lag is still difficult to manage, so I woke up really really early this morning and I did a few experiments with the code I was working on.

I thought it would be nice to have a family browser for linked files, letting the user choose which family types copy into the control file etc...
With this kind of browser the user can visually see which family belongs to each one of the linked files, it would be great to have a search field to filter the tree (just have no idea how to do it right now, I'm still learning).
Next major step will be implement a tab interface for group of settings and objects such as System families, Other families (I've to find a way to separate annotations from model families as the tendenency is to get rid of annotations in linked files), Materials, Filled patterns, Keynotes, View Filters and View templates... of course I know that most of these features are already there with the transfer project standards but, what I'm trying to do, is to reverse the process: instead of doing the transfer for each one of the linked files, I would like to do the same thing from one control file to all the linked files, just once, extending control over non system families and their parameters.
In addition to that there's the visual control of the contents of the model (walls and floors detailed sections, material swatches, doors and windows assemblies, management of family names and type names accordingly to a user defined sequence of parameters/codes).
There's so much to do to make it work properly though.

So here's a my first attempt, what do you think? please let me know in the comments below.

 

Family Management Utils - WIP

UPDATE

This tool I've developed works on door and window families between different files letting the user edit them inside a single control file and pushing the edited families back to the other files. I've collected a few lines of code and put it all together with a very simple interface.

This is the workflow I've imagined:

1. Link the different projects into a single control file (CF)
2. Acquire the families from the linked files cliking on Copy Types
3. Delete duplicate types if necessary
4. Create assemblies with 3 main views and dimensions for each type, assigning a unique Type Mark automatically, each assembly is named with this syntax: (TypeMark)_Family_Type
5. Edit the components as necessary, fill in the data where needed and then update the linked files with the new version
6. You can finally create assemblies in each linked file for documentation purposes, each assembly is created in the first phase and demolished right in the next phase of the phase sequence, so to not interact with the actual project.

During the process the linked files have to be unloaded, keep in mind that also the family type names shouldn't change before the update, otherwise the tool won't be able to perfomr the update as expected.

For the sake of this example I'm using two linked files, a simple one and a workshared one.

In both cases there are the same door and window families and I'm showing the steps of the workflow, when the linked files are loaded the type mark for the family type in common between the CF and the links can't be changed, this is true for any other parameter such as width, height or material finish.

Once in the linked file a purge unused is recomended.

I still haven't figure out how to dismiss automatically the dialog when reloading families and override the parameters. Any suggestion is appreciated.

Copy Links macro

Inspired by this post by Luke Johnson of What Revit Wants, I thought I could write a macro to achieve the same goal but in a cleaner way, without doing copy/paste gymnastics.

Running this macro will copy all the Revit links from a source document to a destination one from which the macro has been launched while having the documents both opened in the same session.

Here you can find the macro. If you are happy with my code, please show me some gratitude Paying What You Want via PayPal to:

puntorevit@gmail.com