Export Family Types Catalog for Multiple Families

Revit
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Hi all - I need help exporting family types catalogs for multiple families, and then deleting all the types from the family. The purpose of this is to keep the family types stored in catalogs only to avoid getting all types loaded in a project when a family is loaded. Thanks!

2

Hello,

Can you post some screenshots of your current build/attempts?

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hi @Robert_Younger, I actually don’t know where to start

4

Generally speaking, most users of the forum are not interested in doing another person’s work, but are more than willing to help fix errors or to suggest simpler versions of workflows that are being attempted.

In the interest of not doing your work, I’ll instead ask you a few questions that might help point you in the right direction, or at least give you the chance to work on smaller parts.

  • What’s your goal? I see you want to avoid getting every family type in a catalog loaded into the project… is there a reason you need Dynamo to do this instead of Revit’s Type Catalog loading feature?

  • Are you planning to do this one family at a time (running a script for each family), or trying to do all of them at once?

  • Suppose you did delete all the types from the family. Does that leave you with a usable family?

  • Where are these families + type catalogs coming from?

  • Is all of this work meant to be done in family files, or in a project file?

The more that you can break down the pieces of your workflow, and explain the why behind each piece, the easier it will be to translate the process to a Dynamo graph.

My understanding of standard Type Catalog usage would be that you load families in via Revit using the Load Family command, select the small number of Types from the Type catalog that you actually want, and then load only those Types into the project file. This does not delete or modify the Type Catalog file, it just gives you a pruned down list for your project. What part of this process is not working for your needs?

Hope this helps get you started.

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6

You can start here, then search for opening families from a directory.

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7

In native Revit, you would normally open the family file, do the export, then open up the family parameters tab and delete all but one of the types. Then you would repeat this for each family file of interest.

To do this in batch, you would need to have a few things prepared or understood:

  1. Collect all of the family files of interest into a list.
  2. Understand how to open/close a family file in the background, since you’ll be doing this to many family files. There are multiple forum threads on this topic, the topics generally involve adding parameters but should be relevant to your needs.
  3. Understand how to export Type Catalogs. Unfortunately I see a lot of threads about exporting information to excel but almost none about actually executing the Type Catalog export command.
    *Option 1: Research if there’s a python method to execute the type catalog export. EDIT: @SeanP to the rescue here.
    *Option 2: Open up a type catalog, learn the structure of how they’re built, and make your own script that mirrors that formatting.
    *Option 3: Be satisfied with the more common approach of exporting to excel. Depends on what your needs are.
  4. Understand how to delete familytypes while within a family file.
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