February 26, 2016

Dynamo: Exporting All Schedules in a Revit Model

Autodesk® Revit® allows you to export the contents of a single Schedule View to a tab-delimited text file which can then be opened in a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft® Excel® [Application Menu > Export > Reports > Schedule]. Handy enough, but what if you have multiple Schedule Views that need to be exported multiple times during the life of a project, as part of a defined information exchange? Individually exporting each Schedule View could quickly become tedious.

Let Dynamo deal with the tedium. A fairly simple graph will export all of the Schedule Views in a project.
This graph is set up to be run manually, as the user will need to use the Directory Path node to specify the folder into which the exported Schedule Views will be placed. The Element Types and All Elements of Type nodes gather all of the Schedule Views [ViewSchedule objects] in the project. The Element.Name and Code Block nodes create the file name for each exported Schedule View by concatenating the ViewSchedule Name with a ".txt" file extension. The Python Script node does the heavy lifting, taking a list of ViewSchedule objects, the directory path and a corresponding list of file names, generates the exported files, and returns a list indicating whether or not each item was exported.

Credit for the Python Script belongs to Dimitar Venkov, who posted a script for exporting a single ViewSchedule in this thread in the Dynamo forum. I modified that script to work with a list of ViewSchedules and a corresponding list of exported file names. A for loop processes each ViewSchedule in turn, and a list of the results is gathered and set as the node output.

Variations on this can be done to export a selected number of ViewSchedules. A simple version is shown below, in which the user has to set up a series of Views nodes, one for each desired ViewSchedule, and then generate a list by passing each one to an input of a List.Create node. A little labor intensive, but if you need to do this multiple times for a given project, you could save a copy with the needed ViewSchedules set up and then run it when new exports are needed

Antony McPhee posted examples using a string filter to export all of the ViewSchedules with a Name starting with a specified string to that same Dynamo forum thread.

February 10, 2016

Revit: Which Update Corresponds to Which Build Number?

This Autodesk Knowledge Network Article lists the Build Number for Autodesk® Revit® versions from 2012 through 2016, Update 1 for R2. I expect the article will be updated with any future updates/service packs for 2016 (and beyond).

The Build Number can be determined by selecting the About Autodesk Revit 20xx item on the Help drop-down list found at the upper right corner of the Revit window. Select the right portion of the Help split button (with the down arrow icon) to deploy the drop-down list.

The Build Number is located in the upper right corner of the About Autodesk Revit 20xx dialog.

(Click on any image to see a full-size version.)