Hi all.
I’ve ran into a workflow issue with exporting family types in Revit. I create MEP Families, and export the 30+ types into a type catalog. It’s easy enough to do in Revit, however the type catalog is never exported in the format I want it to be in. We name our types by the model number followed by electrical config… so 1000 - 120V - 1PH; 1250 … ; 1500…4000. It always export out of order, when I want it to be in ascending format. Also, we want specific parameters at the front of the type catalogue, voltage, Input rates, etc, so when a customer opens the family in the project, all the important family parameters appear at the beginning so its easier to pick the types needed.
The process to manually do this is to export the family types in Revit, open the txt type catalog in excel, delimite the txt file by commas, manually sort it by cutting and pasting rows/columns, save back into a txt file, open the txt file and ctrl + h to find the spaces and replace all with a comma, save and done.
I was wondering if anyone has attempted to create this custom Type Catalog in dynamo/python. I have started writing a script to sort all the family type data, but it requires that I manually created the type catalog in Revit and open the txt in excel and then use dynamo to format in the correct order etc. At this point it would be easier to just manually do it. Has anyone attempted to have dynamo export family types and organize to your liking? Or perhaps a python script could help here as well.
Thank you!!
I welcome you to try Family Type Manager. The program was custom built in Excel to automate all of the time consuming tasks you mention. It has one-click importing and exporting from Excel. You can quickly organize and multi-level sort your data, and bulk purge any unnecessary information. The program also exports the .txt Type Catalogs from Excel in UTF-16LE format to work with all versions of Revit and in any languages. This eliminates all of the manual tasks you mention. The program also has a Type Builder that you can use for Type Catalogs and Lookup Tables. It uses recursive permutations to generate up to a million Family Types and Lookup Table configurations within a few seconds.
Family Type Manager
King regards,
Geoff
Export your information as normal from Revit. You can make a dynamo script that can gather all of the family information from the folder you export your Revit families to, obtain all of the parameter information you need, organize it, and export it to excel or as csv.
I had the same frustrations with Revit limitations when exporting Type Catalogs. I just published Family Type Exporter on the app store. It replaces the Revit Exporter. You now have full control of what parameters are exported and in which order. For programmers, it exposes 20 API parameter assignments exportable to Excel. It generates an assignment file of all nested parameters. Finally, you can export Type Catalogs for all 14 languages within any version of Revit. This app solves all issues you have addressed and it does not require Dynamo or Excel. I hope you like it.
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