Get dialogue box with list of Element IDs

Revit
1

After I have filtered down to a list of elements which I want in a list, how can I create a list of their Element IDs which will show up in a dialogue box from which I can then copy and paste? I want to have a semi-colon as a separator between each Element ID as well to make it easy to paste into Revit’s “Select by ID” dialogue box. If this could be done with only a limited amount of Python and API usage I would appreciate it since I am just starting to learn how to use these. Thanks for any help!

2

Assuming you already have something like DataShapes or another package for presenting a dialog box, you just need to concatenate your list of elements (as Ids). You can use Element.Id and String.Join as a simple ootb node solution. If you want to do it all in python then you can loop through each element in your list and add to a running output. Start with an empty string like output = "". Then loop through your elements; for each element in the list combine output = output + ";" + element.Id to add to the list of Ids.

3

I do have DataShapes but have hardly used it. Is the MultipleInputForm++ a good node to use for this, or is there a better node in this package for a dialogue box to produce text values? I may try the Python method you explained, though that will take me a while since I don’t know how specifically how to make the loop you mention (outside of the two portions you detailed already).

4

Yes. It has a dialog box option. I believe Rhythm or Springs also has a (simpler) dialog box node, but it would probably be good to get comfortable with DataShapes. It’s very useful when it comes to custom inputs.

1 Like
5

I’ll give it a shot with Data Shapes. One more part of this task I don’t know how to do: how do I retrieve the Element IDs themselves as strings? I see them in my list of objects with the green highlighted links; would it be simplest to convert these elements to strings then remove the number of characters from the front which aren’t the Element IDs? Or would you suggest another approach?

6

Dynamo has an Element.Id node that will return the element Id. The API uses a similar method, element.Id, for most objects.

1 Like
7

That’ll make it easy. Thank you very much!