Synchronise directory of Autodesk Desktop Connector BIM360 with Dynamo

hello, is there a possibility to Synchronise directory of Autodesk Desktop Connector BIM360 with Dynamo?

Reason is that it does not synchrinise most of the times and I would like to avoid to open the directory and synchrinise manually each time.

image

Not sure it would be what your looking for, but I have used a FileStream in the past to read a few bytes then stop so it forces it to synchronize. I don’t think there is a way to access any type of automation for the drive itself.

You may also want to check this out from @john_pierson and see if it could be useful.

1 Like

Hello Sean, I tried to read Revit files of Autodesk Desktop Connector as string with the node ReadText of Dynamo and it takes like 25 seconds to run, but not sure if that synchronises the drive though.
image

What is FileStream? Never heard of it

Yes, it can take a while with large or multiple files, that’s why I only read the first few bytes, but it can still prompt Desktop connector to synch the files, however they may not immediately be available for use in the graph because they still need to download, my hack just get the process moving.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/io.html

2 Likes

My low-tech approach to this was a robocopy script, scheduled with the windows scheduler to run out of hours

Low-tech because it is inefficient- each file is duplicated- with the robocopy version as well as forcing the cache copy to update as well
I can’t remember the details, but think I put the files into a folder based on the date I.e I had a series of date-based backups
You also have to remember that the DC gives each file .rvt extension , but they are in fact zip files, including all linked files as well as the host file- so more data duplication

3 Likes

please can you provide a reference or example? no idea how to proceed

read up on the Microsoft Robocopy utility
There are a lot of options, switches etc- but in its simplest form, syntax is
robocopy <source> <destination> [options]

So for the desktop connector files, it would be something like:
robocopy "C:\Users\User\ACCDocs\<organisation>\<project>" "D:\BIM360" /s /XA:H

The desktop connector path used to be different- ‘BIM360’ rather than ‘ACCDocs’- not sure if this varies depending on the version you have. In other example above, the /s switch copies subdirectories and the /XA:H switch skips hidden files

4 Likes