Determining RVT File Version Using Python

Before diving into a programming topic, albeit a non-Revit-API one, let me highlight this interesting read on The View from Inside the Factory: What’s Next for Revit 2018, well worthwhile for programmers and non-programmers alike, discussing stuff like:

The way we develop and deliver Revit software... what that means to you, and to us, the folks 'inside the factory'... agile development and delivery... more frequent releases... Revit Roadmap and Revit Ideas Page...

Returning to programming issues, we discussed several approaches to read the BasicFileInfo and RVT OLE storage, aka COM Structured Storage, to retrieve stuff like the file version and preview image, and, more lately, alternative access to BIM data via Forge:

• RVT file version using Python rvtver.py
• RFA file version using Python rvtver.py
• C# Revit OLE Storage viewer
• Basic File Info and RVT file version via C# console application
• Reading an RVT File without Revit
• External Access to the Revit API

Frederic now presented another more efficient Python solution for accessing the RVT file version in his comment on the first post above:

I recently needed the same functionality, but in a large project file the BasicFileInfo was in line 900000 of 3000000 if I remember correctly.

So, I needed something that accesses the BasicFileInfo directly.

With the external olefile Python package from pypi.org, that was very easy and readable – check out my gist:

import os.path as op
import olefile
import re

def get_rvt_file_version(rvt_file):
  if op.exists(rvt_file):
    if olefile.isOleFile(rvt_file):
      rvt_ole = olefile.OleFileIO(rvt_file)
      bfi = rvt_ole.openstream("BasicFileInfo")
      file_info = bfi.read().decode("utf-16le", "ignore")
      pattern = re.compile(r"\d{4}")
      rvt_file_version = re.search(pattern, file_info)[0]
      return rvt_file_version
    else:
      print("file does not apper to be an ole file: {}".format(rvt_file))
  else:
    print("file not found: {}".format(rvt_file))

Thank you very much for sharing this, Frederic!