If you have it, BIMLink is a great piece of software with many different uses, from project setup to managing the bi-directional flow of data, through to standards and overall process management.

One of the things I’ve used it for quite a bit is renaming family names and type names bringing family content into line with company naming conventions turning a mess like this

into something clean like this

If you’ve ever ventured down this path, you may have discovered a shortfall in the process due to BIMLink not being able include families in a ‘type link’ with families that don’t actually have a defined type like these ones highlighted below

This suddenly makes the standardisation process a whole lot more time consuming because if you have a lot of families without defined types, there is nothing BIMLink can do to help you. I even spoke with the Ideate team at the Australian Revit Technology Conference recently and they confirmed that this was the case and there wasn’t much they could do to help out as they are limited to what they can do by the Revit API.

I was determined to overcome the issue though, there had to be a way where I didn’t have to manually create a new type for every single family!

My first thought was to export all the families and then use journal files to batch process them, in concept it worked; each file in my list would have a new family type created but unfortunately it would fail after it created the new family type on the families without an existing type – the exact families I was trying to work with. I could continue to process the next file by restarting the batch but mindlessly restarting batch files until all the files were modified wasn’t the solution I was looking for.

In the end the solution was C#. BIMLink might be limited by the API because it is dealing with families within the open model, but I wasn’t limited to that as I’d already exported the family files to my local machine.

I came up with was a somewhat simple C# macro that processes a group of families in a predetermined folder, from there it creates a new family type for each simply named New_Family.

I had initially wanted to create family types named Standard but realised I’d likely run into issues with my macro due to it’s simplicity if I came across a family that already included the Standard type name.

public void ProcessNewTypes()
{
    Autodesk.Revit.ApplicationServices.Application application = this.Application;
    string directory = @"C:\INSERT\FILE\LOCATION";
    string s = "";

    // loop through all files in the directory
    foreach (string filename in Directory.GetFiles(directory))
    {
        s += "Family Name,Family Type,";
        Document doc = application.OpenDocumentFile(filename);

    // skip any files that are not family *.rfa files
        if (!doc.IsFamilyDocument)
            return; 

    // create the new family types
        using (Transaction t = new Transaction(doc, "Create New Family Type"))
            {
            t.Start();

        FamilyManager familyManager = doc.FamilyManager;

    // this is the new family type name
        {
            familyManager.NewType("New_Family");
        }

    // commit the changes and save the family *.rfa file
        t.Commit();
        doc.Save();

            }

      }
}

And it was that simple. For me, the macro processed around 350 families in a few seconds.

Once complete, you can reload the families into your template or project file and then process the files through BIMLink as per usual to rename the family and type names.

For any families that already had a determined type and have now ended up with two types, you can simply purge out the New_Family types from the model.