Schedules of Revit Family types and Excel?

Packages
1

I’ve been poking about looking for a good way to get several types of schedule data out of Revit into Excel, doing some edits, and then updating families based on the changed Excel data.

I’ve been running into a lot of dead ends, and while it seems like Dynamo should be able to do this (albeit something akin to swatting a fly with a remote ai controlled drone) but the relative lack of documentation and naming conventions vs Revit has me a bit confused. (thanks to all of you who are working on this so far, and have produced a passel of great content)

I’d like to be able to take an annotation family, generate a list of all of the types of that family in the project in excel, (with a few parameters relative to types), make minor edits or updates to those values in Excel, and then drive changes to the target Family in Revit.

  • background context: we get owner supplied lists of owner supplied items which may or may not be modeled at all and cover lots of kinds of objects, so the most appropriate method for noting these in CDs is to drop a “tag” annotation of something like “OS-02” onto a view and then have a schedule of the types of that annotation. There may be multiple instances of one “OS-02”, so an instance parameter becomes unworkable.

How do I get a list of types of a family? particularly an annotation family? I’m not finding anything useful in "categories"
Once I have that list, can I use that to generate more types via new lines in Excel? From what I’ve seen editing text parameters in the Excel file and pushing them back seems trivial.

 

 

 

2

You can select all family types of a family the following way:

capture1

Further to your query, you can duplicate family types if you download the Clockwork package and try the “ElementType.Duplicate” node.

However I’m not exactly sure how you can edit any parameters of the tag family, because last time I checked the only parameters exposed were visibility and alignment parameters…

3

Thats what I needed, thanks!

 

Now I’m having trouble getting it back in…

Can someone explain a bit more about “Element.SetParameterByName” to me?

I’m having trouble getting “Family.Symbol” to land in “element” for “Element.SetParameterByName” I’m getting “no paramater found by that name”

 

edit:

i note that in some examples of this i’m seeing “var” as the end of “Element.SetParameterByName” where I have “element”

edit2:

Got it. it would seem that somewhere in the process Excel cells with a value of 100 were being treated as a number “100.000” on reimport, and that was confusing thing. adding a space or letter to the values in the excel file make the reimport work fine.

can someone explain what was happening?

4

Unfortunately the only parameters made available to Dynamo are orientation and leaderhead. You’ll need to use custom nodes to change the family type of tags. Luckily for you the “archi-lab.net” package by Konrad has you covered:

2015-03-10_111231

You can find more info here: