Hi Everybody. I have a few key interests in the platform and number one among them is creating a robust bi-directional excel link.
I started playing around with Dynamo and i am getting a grasp on the basics and wrote a blog post on the topic here:
http://bimtroublemaker.blogspot.sg/2014/09/practical-dynamo-excel-linking.html
What i found as i was playing though was that once i spit the data into excel, if i sorted the strings alphabetically, they would lose track of the family they belonged to.
My question is how can i get Dynamo to remember which data goes with which family instance so when i bring the data back from excel, it will map the new data appropriately?
The file from my blog post are here:
Bidirectional Excel link
Its simple stuff… please be gentle with me… I’m a noob!
Hello Phil Lazarus,
Thanks a lot for nice blog post.
There are custom packages that output elements to IDs but I haven’t found a way of then using those IDs to then select elements (probably an easy task if you know some python; I don’t).
Some things I have tried are using packages for sorting: creating a list of lists, doing sorting operations, then using elements to reassign values. If you have to export to Excel, you could just do a sequence of the length of your list and use that with a sort by keylist operation to bring back from Excel.
At least for third party excel in/out addins in Revit, they have to include the ID/GUID parameter when you export and maintain this when sorting/doing formatting to the list. search for GUID in the package manager to at least be able to read the GUID from elements.