Import vs Link CAD files

General
1

I have an issue with people linking and importing CAD files. Is it possible to get an alert when someone Imports a CAD file? The difference would be - Link requires me to go – manage - Manage Links - Cad Formats - Add. To import I would – Insert - Import CAD.

Not sure of the best way to go about getting this information.

In the discovery view I see that the action - Export File Data with a Command of “Transaction Successful” comes up when I Import a file. I also get the same data when I link a file…

Anyway it is getting late so I will look again in the morning…

Thank you!!

2

@Gilly we do have an event in revit-log called File Imported but unfortunately at the moment it doesn’t distinguish between imports and links of CAD files. I didn’t realize that we weren’t doing that so I added that in and will make that available in the next release. It will look like this:

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As you can see there will be a new boolean property file.isLinked so for imports it will be set to false.

That’s for the next release though. How about now. Through the revit-journal index you can see when someone imports by catching an event called Import as Link when Action is set to 0 which means that it was imported. If it was set to 1, it would have been linked.

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Does that help?

3

Yes this helps - I will start with this one and look forward to the next release.

If you can not answer yet that is fine but I was wondering if you have a rough idea when the next release might be?

Thank you!!

4

@ksobon - FYI - It would be nice to be able to get the project information - It looks like we will get that when the update comes out. Moving to revit-log…

Thanks

5

@Gilly yes, project info will be in the revit-log once the update is out. Next release we are shooting for before the end of the year. If that fails early next year.

6

Following up on this topic. We have now released version 1.1.40, which includes boolean file.IsLinked under revit-log. This can be used to create an alert for when a CAD file is imported into Revit as opposed to being linked.

Additionally, project information is now captured within revit-log.

7

any chance this info will make its way into revit-user?

8

We cannot add a file.IsLinked parameter into revit-user due to how it is collecting data, which comes from from users’ journal file.

However, there is a way to distinguish between users importing CAD vs linking CAD.

When the Link CAD or Import CAD commands are used, revit-user logs several documents.

What we are looking for is the field Comid, which is ID_FILE_IMPORT for import events, and ID_FILE_CADFORMAT_LINK for link events.
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Therefore, to get a count of how many times a user has imported CAD, you can create a metric for count of documents where Comid is ID_FILE_IMPORT

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Note: Data view revit-journal is collecting information from the revit-user indices. The name is meant to reflect that the information is coming from the journal files.

In what case are you looking for this information from revit-user? revit-event provides a more direct solution and includes information on what Revit file the action was perfomed in, whereas revit-user does not.

9

To add to the above, our Revit - Selective Commands Traffic Light dashboard comes out-of-the-box, and includes a count of Import CAD events along with other not-so-best-practice events.

10

I meant the file project information in revit-user

11

The Revit journal doesn’t include information relating to the file the logs are coming from. but we’re actively working on a solution! It will be available in a future release.