Revit 2025.1 and Handling Lack of UI in DA

A quick heads-up on the first update release of Revit 2025, a solution for placing a detail group in ASP Design Automation, lacking the UI, and an LLM retrieval augmented generation in 10 lines of code:

Revit 2025.1

The Revit 2025.1 update release was made available on May 22, 2024, via Autodesk Access or from the Autodesk subscription site.

The official Revit 2025.1 update release notes list the following details:

Software Included

Enhancements

Issues Resolved

Revit 2025.1 SDK

The Revit SDK was also updated. The updated version is available from the APS Revit developer page. One small change in the documentation right up front says:

Major changes and renovations to the Revit 2025.1 API

API additions

AspNetCore

Revit now has a framework reference to Microsoft.AspNetCore.App, so that addins can use AspNetCore.

Furthermore, note the API-related issues listed above, some of them not under the API heading:

Revit 2025.1

Placing Detail Group Without UI Access

Luiz Henrique @ricaun Cassettari provided a nice workaround to enable placing detail group in legend view without access to UI, e.g., for Design Automation:

Question: I would like to place a detail group in legend view without access to UI for Design Automation: in Design Automation for Revit, I want to place detail groups onto a legend view. The approach would typically be:

However, in Design Automation, I don't have access to the UI and therefore cannot set UIDocument.Activeview. Is there an alternative method for placing detail groups which takes in a View as an argument? Or are there ways to change the ActiveView in Design Automation?

Ricaun provided non-UI-dependent code that places both model and detail groups. It just lacks the possibility to control the target view.

However, this can be worked around by letting Revit place the detail group in any old view, then copy and paste to the desired target view and delete the intermediate element.

Here is a 30-minute video testing placement of a detail group in both Revit on the Windows desktop and Revit for Design Automation:

Going even further, ricaun implemented RevitTestPlaceGroup.Tests, a unit test project for the PlaceGroup problem and shows it running in another 36-minute video on creating PlaceGroupDetail unit test for Revit API:

Ever so many thanks to ricaun for the very helpful work and excellent documentation!

Hacker's Guide to LLM and 10-Line RAG

A hacker’s guide to language models provides a nice introduction to the topic and includes subjects like implementing retrieval augmented generation e.g., how to implement RAG in 10 lines.