Loading Families from Cloud Server like "UNIFI"

Revit
1

Hi Everyone :slight_smile: I have a script to load families in Revit that can filter the family names I only need from an excel database. Buy I wanted to connect the script to “UNIFI”. SO my families will be directly loaded from cloud server like Unify. Do you have an idea how to do this using cloud server like unify or other cloud server? Thanks in advance!!!

2

Check the Unifi API. It might be possible to find the family, download to a local drive, and load it in from there.

3

Hi Hamish, thank you for your reply. This is actually the challenge since our family is consistently updating and we are directly using Inify to load families. We are no longer using local sever. All our flatform are in cloud and it will be a step back for us if will go back to local. Thanks

4

In my experience, one of the universal truths of the cloud is that everything gets saved to a temporary location on disc prior to opening/loading/working with it in a desktop application (web apps being the exception that proves the rule - those files are saved on the cloud box running what you’re working with).

This is because the internet doesn’t send a ‘full file’, but small chunks which have to be assembled into the file (download a large attachment in Chrome for an example - you’ll see the .download extension temporarily before it becomes the actual file).

Some examples which do this:

  • Revit Cloud Worksharing
  • OneDrive
  • Dropbox
  • Google Drive
  • Collaboration for Civil
  • Desktop Connector
  • Load Autodesk Family feature of Revit
    It may be that Unity has found a means of sending a complete file as one object instead of streams to prevent the need of interacting with the file locally. However I’d wager that someone would have bought them out already as that’d be a VERY big change to how the internet works. My guess is that a workflow like download as a temp file > load temp file into project, overwriting previous if existing > delete temp file is what they are using.
1 Like
5

Hi Hamish, thank you for your reply. This is actually the challenge since our family is consistently updating and we are directly using Inify to load families. We are no longer using local sever. All our flatform are in cloud and it will be a step back for us if will go back to local. Thanks

Unifi isn’t “live” or anything. Once the family is loaded into the project it’s static and any update to that family needs to be re-imported into the project, so I don’t see why it’d make a difference.

As @jacob.small mentions, Unifi is probably downloading a temp file to somewhere, and then telling Revit to load it. You’d be writing a script to tell it download multiple files from Unifi (assuming that API call works well), then tell Revit to load those families, which is essentially the same thing Unifi is doing anyway.

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Thank you @jacob.small and @Hamish , now its clearer to me. I will try do align with your advice and will let you know the result. Have a great Day!

7

@arjay.mendoza Hi…Any updates on this? Atleast is it possible to download files from Unifi through Dynamo scripts? TIA :slight_smile: