Why DynamoAutomation?

Dynamo users can build their own custom workflows on top of Revit which is an easy way of automating a lot of the day-to-day menial tasks that are difficult, time-consuming or just plain tedious with out-of-the-box Revit or other addins. However, performing these workflows on multiple Revit models still requires a lot of manual work: open a Revit model, run the Dynamo workflow, close the model and repeat that same process for each model. In current practice, many BIM managers resort to using manually rewritten journal files to batch process Revit models.

The most important obstacle to batch processing with Dynamo is the fact that Dynamo can only process one model at a time. While this is perfectly fine for conducting project-specific work, it is not quite so great when dealing with recurring tasks that have to be applied regularly to several models. Running the same graph on multiple models means a lot of tedious manual labour: open a model, open Dynamo, load a graph, execute it, close the model, open the next model, run the graph again, close the model and so on.

This also means that Dynamo currently cannot switch between models while a graph is running, e.g. switch to a loaded family or a linked model. This, however, would be an important prerequisite for processing an entire model structure. It currently makes tasks like family editing from within a project impossible (which could be easily achieved with a custom addin or macro – if you know how to code those).

The DynamoAutomation package allows Dynamo users to batch process multiple Revit models by driving Revit (and the Dynamo addin) from the outside using the Dynamo sandbox, each time using the same Dynamo workflow, e.g. process an entire folder of models. This opens up a lot of possibilities for achieving a higher degree of automation in labour-intensive areas such as quality control and enforcement of company or project standards.