Icon Access and Reference Plane in Family Instance

Today I highlight two of Fair59’s numerous solutions in the Revit API forum, and also mention a joke I picked up in a Swedish cartoon:

• Fadaesen on racism versus realism
• Retrieving a reference plane location in a family instance
• Accessing the Revit ribbon icons

Fadaesen on Racism versus Realism

As I recently mentioned, I visited Sweden in the beginning of August for a week’s hiking.

Before getting to the Revit API stuff, let me share this little cartoon that I enjoyed in the train there.

The artist and author, Marja Nyberg ↗, very kindly gave me permission to translate and reproduce it here:

• i am not a racist, i’m just being realistic
• OK, OK i am not a human being, i am a miniature horse
• what do you mean? of course you’re not
• oh sorry, i thought we were playing the game ‘negate what you obviously are and then say something random as far as possible removed from the truth’
• hey, you just listen now! i am not an idiot! don’t you think i can see what you and your likes are up to in this country?
• … are you quite sure we are not playing that game? because that last one was REALLY nice

Back to the Revit API, though…

Retrieving a Reference Plane Location in a Family Instance

Fair59 continues providing pretty advanced, tricky and just-about perfect solutions to many challenging questions in the Revit API discussion forum ↗, such as for this thread on getting the position of a reference plane in a family instance ↗:

Question: Is it possible to determine the position of a reference plane in a family instance that is not aligned with any mass or other object?

I need its direction and position.

I tried to use the ReferenceIntersector, but it does not detect this reference.

Answer: You could start out from the very informative and useful previous thread on retrieving the direction of a reference (reference plane or reference line) ↗.

That only determines the direction. However, from the dimension in the code, you could also find a point on the plane.

On the other side, here is an alternative approach:

You can create a sketch plane using the reference, then query the origin and normal from the geometry plane of the sketch plane.

  /// <summary>
  /// Retrieve origin and direction of the left
  /// reference plane within the given family instance.
  /// </summary>
  static bool GetFamilyInstanceReferencePlaneLocation(
    FamilyInstance fi,
    out XYZ origin,
    out XYZ normal )
  {
    bool found = false;
    origin = XYZ.Zero;
    normal = XYZ.Zero;

    Reference r = fi
      .GetReferences( FamilyInstanceReferenceType.Left )
      .FirstOrDefault();

    if( null != r )
    {
      Document doc = fi.Document;

      using( Transaction t = new Transaction( doc ) )
      {
        t.Start( "Create Temporary Sketch Plane" );
        SketchPlane sk = SketchPlane.Create( doc, r );
        if( null != sk )
        {
          Plane pl = sk.GetPlane();
          origin = pl.Origin;
          normal = pl.Normal;
          found = true;
        }
        t.RollBack();
      }
    }
    return found;
  }

Many thanks to Frank @Fair59 ↗ Aarssen for this effective solution, and his many other helpful answers, and also to Alexander @aignatovich ↗ Ignatovich, aka Александр Игнатович, for the blog post suggestion.

By the way, I added this method to The Building Coder samples ↗, which heretofore lacked any example at all of using the relatively new family instance GetReferences method, in the module CmdDimensionInstanceOrigin.cs ↗.

Accessing the Revit Ribbon Icons

Fair59 and Matt Taylor also recently provided another useful forum answer, in the two threads on Revit ribbon icons and pictograms ↗ and view icons in Revit ↗:

Question: I would like to display icons instead of dumb text in my add-in ribbon user interface.

Does anybody where I can find the built-in Revit icons and pictograms?

Answer: You can quickly check to see what icons are available in any DLL by:

• Right click on any desktop shortcut > Properties > Change Icon > Browse to the DLL file.

The built-in Revit icons are contained in the file Utility.dll in the same folder as Revit.exe.

Many thanks to Frank and Matt for helping to solve these two questions as well.