RTC Report LMV Model Upload and Translation

I presented the CompHound component tracker project as work in progress at the Revit Technology Conference RTC Europe in Budapest last week.

• RTC Conference and Connecting Desktop to Cloud
• Driving the View and Data API Upload and Translation from a C# Add-In
• Current CompHound Versions and To Do

Meanwhile, autumn is well advanced here in Switzerland:

RTC Conference and Connecting Desktop to Cloud

Here is an overview of the RTC conference, the three sessions I gave, and a bunch of photo albums I published during my stay:

• RTC Classes and Getting Started with Revit Macros
• RTC, Budapest and the Revit API Panel
• Connecting Desktop and Cloud, Room Editor Update

The really interesting one for us here is the last, on connecting the desktop with the cloud.

Driving the LMV Upload and Translation from a C# Add-In

In the meantime, my colleague Adam Nagy implemented automatic LMV model upload and translation functionality for the CompHoundInv Inventor C# add-in to populate the CompHound web database.

I integrated Adam's uploaded into the Revit add-in CompHoundRvt as well, in release 2016.0.0.6.

Now, whenever the component occurrence data of a Revit or Inventor model is uploaded to the web database, the model itself is automatically uploaded and translated for viewing in the View and Data API viewer at the same time.

We are talking about improving the upload and translation source code, since it is currently asynchronous.

Philippe Leefsma implemented an asynchronous uploader in his Rest API wrapper library for .NET applications, but that does not yet handle complex models with different component files referencing each other, as is common in Revit and Inventor.

We plan to merge these two streams in future.

Meanwhile, the uploading works and the translated model URN is added to each component instance data:

The next step I want to look at is to isolate each component occurrence in the LMV model view when it is selected in the web database.

Current CompHound Versions and To Do

All the project source code is available from the CompHound organisation GitHub repositories. The current versions discussed above are the web server CompHoundWeb 0.0.39 and the C# REST API clients CompHoundRvt 2016.0.0.6 for Revit and CompHoundInv 2016.0.0.1 for Inventor.

The web server is freshly redeployed to Heroku, driving the mongo database hosted on mongolab. As always, the links to try it out live are up and running, so feel free to play around with it to your heart's content.

Here is the updated to-do list:

• Use the asynchronous C# upload and translation library.
• Implement isolated viewing of an individual selected instance.
• Enable editing of some component occurrence properties.

I plan to complete these before submitting my Autodesk University handout material due this Friday and presenting the project at AU in Las Vegas in December.