Unit Conversion Utility Update

Here is a Revit 2013 update of the Revit 2011 unit conversion utility, originally posted and described for Revit 2010, by Harry Mattison ↗.

In his own words:

I was looking at the great unit conversion utility and created a new version upgraded to use the Revit 2013 API that I thought you readers might enjoy.

I ran into one issue that required a code enhancement to catch an exception thrown by many parameters, such as HVAC_Temperature, HVAC_Slope, etc.

The rest of the code handles error conditions nicely, so I was surprised to see these uncaught exceptions.

I solved it by adding a try/catch statement around the existing call to AddParameter in frmUnitConversions.cs:

  if( null == _Parameter )
  {
    // Create a new parameter
 
    try
    {
      _Parameter
        = _DbDocument.FamilyManager.AddParameter(
          parameterTypeToCreate.ToString(),
          BuiltInParameterGroup.INVALID,
          parameterTypeToCreate,
          false );
    }
    catch( Exception ex )
    {
      TaskDialog.Show( "Error",
        "Cannot create parameter '"
        + parameterTypeToCreate.ToString()
        + "' with parameter type '"
        + parameterTypeToCreate
        + "' because of exception\n"
        + ex.Message.ToString() );
 
      return;
    }
  }

I think I figured out what is causing this and thought it would be interesting to share with your blog readers:

I am creating family parameters from a shared parameter file. Some parameters have types that are not supported in the version of Revit that I am currently using, which is Revit Architecture.

I created this function to detect the situation:

  public static bool canGetFormatOptions(
    Document doc,
    FamilyParameter familyParameter )
  {
    try
    {
      UnitType parameterUnitType
        = ConvertParameterTypeToUnitType(
          familyParameter.Definition.ParameterType );
 
      doc.ProjectUnit.get_FormatOptions(
        parameterUnitType );
 
      return true;
    }
    catch
    {
      return false;
    }
  }

I use it like this:

  if( !canGetFormatOptions(
    famDoc, familyParameter ) )
  {
    TaskDialog.Show( "Error",
      "Cannot set parameter value.\nUnit Type "
      + ConvertParameterTypeToUnitType(
        familyParameter.Definition.ParameterType )
      + " is not supported in Revit "
      + famDoc.Application.Product.ToString() );
  }

Take care.

The updated code is provided above.

Many thanks to Harry for this update with his enhancement and analysis!