01. Revit API -- Rename the window

• 1. Background
• 2. RENAMING
  • 2.1. Family Hierachy
  • 2.2. Selection
    • 2.2.1. Way1
    • 2.2.2. Way2
  • 2.3. Category Name
  • 2.4. Name of property
  • 2.5. Full CODE
• 3. Summary
• 4. Reference

1. Background

Recently, one of my archi friends wants a tool to rename all the widnows. Mostly, he would delete some the wondows during the design stage, hence, he need a tool to reset the windows number to be continuous when finishing the drafting.

I think the job should be easy, what I need to do is just to select the windows out, and then rename them, quite similar as the pipe job posted before. But the data structure of Revit database is slightly different. Let’s look into this.

2. RENAMING

2.1. Family Hierachy

Firstly, we need to get all the windows object in the reivt document.
As we all know, the Reivt family hierarchy is as below

CATEGORY

FAMILY

TYPE(WALL TYPE, ROOF TYPE)

       WALL

FamilySymbol

       INSTANCE

2.2. Selection

OfCategory

FamilySymbol, FamilyInstance
OfClass
FamilySymbol, FamilyInstance, and Family

2.2.1. Way1

collector.OfCategory(BuiltInCategory.OST_Windows).OfClass(typeof(FamilyInstance));

2.2.2. Way2

    ElementCategoryFilter elementCategoryFilter = new ElementCategoryFilter(BuiltInCategory.OST_Walls);
    ElementClassFilter elementClassFilter = new ElementClassFilter(typeof(FamilyInstance));
    collector.WherePasses(elementClassFilter).WherePasses(elementCategoryFilter);

2.3. Category Name

But how do we know the BuiltInCategory name is OST_Windows of the window. We can use the way below.

2.4. Name of property

When selecting any window by tool Revit Lookup , we can tell that which property will be the tag name on the plan, then we only need to modify this property of the window to rename.

Element windowInstance = item as Element;
windowInstance.LookupParameter("Mark").Set(String.Format("EW-{0}", count));

2.5. Full CODE

    [Transaction(TransactionMode.Manual)]
    class ReNumberWindows : IExternalCommand
    {
        public Result Execute(ExternalCommandData commandData, ref string message, ElementSet elements)
        {
            //1. Select the interactive document
            UIDocument uidoc = commandData.Application.ActiveUIDocument;
            //database document
            Document doc = commandData.Application.ActiveUIDocument.Document;

            //2 create collector
            FilteredElementCollector collector = new FilteredElementCollector(doc);
            //filter to get the Window element

            //Selection
            collector.OfCategory(BuiltInCategory.OST_Windows).OfClass(typeof(FamilyInstance));//FamilyInstance if it is a tree

            


            int count = 0;

            using (Transaction t = new Transaction(doc, "ClearMark"))
            {
                t.Start();
                foreach(var item in collector)
                {
                    if (item is Element)
                    {
                        count += 1;
                        Element windowInstance = item as Element;
                        windowInstance.LookupParameter("Mark").Set(String.Format("EW-{0}", count));
                    }
                }
                t.Commit();
            }

            TaskDialog.Show("Result", String.Format("{0} windows have been renamed", count));

            return Result.Succeeded;
        }

    }

3. Summary

Most of the objects can be found and modified from this way, and Dynamo can achieve the same goal.

Next time, I will analyze how to modify the revision of the sheet, which I didnot find a way in Dynamo.

4. Reference

https://github.com/jeremytammik/RevitLookup

http://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2019/ENU/?guid=Revit_API_Revit_API_Developers_Guide_html