Revit API and Python

Does anyone know the api command for returning an objects Namespace/Class. In my example I want to feed in an element from Revit, such as a piece of furniture and my python return Autodesk.Revit.DB.FamilyInstance. In a different example a wall would return Autodesk.Revit.DB.Wall. I can get the in-built category but seem to be going round in circles trying to access the class, when I’m sure its fairly straightforward.

Not sure if this is what you wanted but Clockwork and Blackbox have nodes that seem to do what I think you wanted. (And yes I have walls to be used as canvas in my current file )

2015-06-02_08h19_23

 

Dynamo and other packages give you the in built categories, but I don’t want it the Revit category, rather its Namespace within the API. In your example with walls I would like to be seeing the full class of Autodesk.Revit.DB.Wall rather than just wall. The reason I need the whole namespace is because these are categorised differently to Revit’s in built categories. As an example a chair created as a family in the furniture category will show as furniture within the in built categories, whereas for this instance I would expect to see Autodesk.Revit.DB.FamilyInstance as the class/namespace. Hope that clears things up slightly.

Maybe this helps:

 

 

Marcel

Mark, you’ll want to use Element.TypeName from Julien Benoit’s excellent package SteamNodes. If you’re dealing with a list of elements, you’ll have to use it with List.Map - otherwise it’ll just tell you the namespace of the list.

Andreas, perfect that’s what I’m after. Always seem to forget about unwrapping elements in python! This leads on to my second question is their a current node that lists out the current revit projects units. So would tell me Length is mm, Area is m­² etc, etc or should I look at this in python also. They need to make searching for useable nodes more intuitive, through peoples libraries.

Mark, since I was not aware of such a node (and because I’ll be needing it for unit conversions when migrating Clockwork to Dynamo 0.8) I went ahead and added that functionality to Clockwork - juts download the latest version (0.75.33):

UnitConversion