LearnRevitAPI

Sep 30, 2023

Select Elements Modifed By a User

🤔 Have you ever wondered, "Who did this or changed that in our work-sharing Revit project?"

Well, pyRevit has a tool that can give us answers for one element. But what if we need to select everything that someone changed in our project?

💡 Let's learn how to select elements that were last modified by someone.

👀 Get All Elements

➡️ First of all let's get all 3D Elements in our Revit Project, so we can sort it by users. Obviously we will use FilteredElementCollector.

I will also make sure that I am selecting Family Instances and they are View Independent .

💡 You can use different method to get your elements.

👽 Who Did That?

🔁 To sort elements by user we need to get that information from Elements. There is a class in Revit API WorksharingUtils.

👉 Inside there is a method called GetWorksharingTooltipInfo.

This method will return you WorksharingTooltipInfo.

And it has the following properties:

.Creator
.Owner
.LastChangedBy

💡 You can choose which property you are interested in.
👇 Here is an example

↪️ Sort Elements by User

💡 Now we know how to get elements and get information about users from them. Let's create a dictionary where we sort all elements by LastChangedBy users.

📦 To do that, we will use defaultdict.

✅ They allow us to specify default value for each of the items in a dict. And we want each user to start with an empty list, so we can append elements to it.

❌ Otherwise you would need to check if user already exists in a dict, and either create an empty list or append to existing. We don't want to do that.

👉 Select User from List

✅ We have a list of all elements sorted by users. Let's ask our end-user whose elements we want to select.

📃 For that we will use SelectFromList form from pyrevit.forms. It's very simple to use and pyRevit documentation has examples that you can copy-paste.