Brainstorming

Before you start automating anything in Revit, just go through the process manually and try to break down all the steps you do.

Let's write all the manual steps we do:

• Select Shared Parameter

• Choose Type/Instance

• Choose Parameter Group

• Choose 'Values can very by group'

• Choose Categories

  
  

I bet you already do these steps so fast, that you don't even notice it. Now we need to follow the same steps with code.

And let's start from the end and look at the documentation. You will find the following method to add parameters:

💡 This method will be obsolete in 2025, but it works in all previous versions. So I will only describe that.

You can see we only need 3 arguments, let's get them one by one.

1. Definition

Definitions are the blueprints of your parameters. And we can get ExternalDefinitions from SharedParameterFile.

Step 1: Select Shared Parameter

Here is a complete code snippet that will:

• Open SharedParameterFile

• Iterate through Groups and Definitions

• Sort in a Dict

• Create pyRevit.SelectFromList form to select

💡You can adjust the code to anything else if you want other logic on selecting parameters.

2. Binding

The next one is Binding. If you explore docs, you will notice that it's an abstract class and we need to use children classes:

• InstanceBinding

• TypeBinding

So we are creating option for this setting.

Step 2: Select ParameterBinding

When you look at how to create them, you will notice that we also need to create a CategorySet.

• InstanceBinding Constructor (CategorySet)

• TypeBinding Constructor (CategorySet)

So we are combining Category Selection and Instance/Type toggle. Here is a code:

There are 2 ways to get your categories and then you can insert them to your NewCategorySet:

Then we need to decide if we want Instance or Type Binding, and we also have 2 options to create this kind of binding:

💡 You just need to select one code line from this example.

3. Group

Lastly, we need to choose a ParamegerGroup.

Step 3: Select Parameter Group

It's very easy because we will use BuiltInParameterGroup Enumeration, so it already contains all possible values same as in Revit UI.

Put it all Together

Alright, we went through all the steps briefly, now let's just combine it into a single code snippet you could actually start using to automate this boring task with some python code.

Here is full python code:

And here is the end result in action:

​

Testimonial Highlight

Here is a recent LearnRevitAPI Testimonial.