Summary
UI Forms in Revit
It's time to focus on UI forms in Revit. We can already create quite a lot of tools with for Revit. However, many of them might need to collect some user input or provide a nice output for the user.
💡 It's a very important step to create a better user experience.
Options for creating UI Forms
We will cover a lot of different options for creating UI forms with Revit API in this module such as:
pyRevit Inputs
pyRevit Outputs
rpw FlexForm
Revit API Native Forms
Windows Forms (Win Forms)
WPF - Windows Presentation Forms
🤔 There are also options to use certain python package for creating forms, but I am not sure if I will cover any of them. Who knows…
Some of these options are super user friendly. Like for example, pyrevit forms can easily create a UI form with a single line of code. However, they are quite limited in the customization.
On the other hand, WPF has no limitation in customization at all, but it comes at a cost of a steep learning curve. You would need to learn how to create .xaml files for the front end and connect it to your python code(back-end). But luckily for you, Chat GPT can help you a lot. Back when I started, I had to watch C# tutorials and translate everything myself back to IronPython.
Conclusion
Overall, after watching this module, you will know it yourself, which of these options will work best for you and your workflows. You might also consider to use the simplest forms during prototyping, and then think of a better looking alternative during refactoring your code.
I still use both the simpliest pyRevit.forms and custom WPF forms, depending on what I'm trying to do and how much spare time I have. There is no need to limit yourself to only 1 option. Just use whatever works for you!