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Revit 2025 API Video and Hiding Linked Elements

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The video recording on what’s new in the Revit 2025 API has been released, and we discuss a nice example combining element pre-selection and PostCommand:

Revit 2025 API Video

Boris Shafiro and Michael Morris present the video recording of the presentations on What’s new in Autodesk Revit 2025 API ↗. It consists of three parts:

Revit 2025 API video

Please also refer to the following previous articles related to Revit 2025 API:

Hiding Linked Elements

Turning to a topic that has not yet been addressed by the new release, the open Revit Ideas wish list item to hide elements in linked model ↗, Lorenzo Virone shared a solution using PostCommand and element pre-selection via Selection.SetReferences. He explains the detailed approach in the Revit API discussion forum ↗ thread on how to hide elements in linked file ↗:

This solution also demonstrates how to preselect elements for PostCommand processing:

// Select elements using UIDocument
// then use PostCommand "HideElements"
// elemsFromRevitLinkInstance is "List<Element>"
// these are the elements you want to hide in the link

var refs = elemsFromRevitLinkInstance.Select( x
  => new Reference(x).CreateLinkReference(revitLinkInstance))
    .ToList();

uidoc.Selection.SetReferences(refs);

uidoc.Application.PostCommand(
  RevitCommandId.LookupPostableCommandId(
    PostableCommand.HideElements));

Response: Can you provide a description of the process for using your code to hide elements only in a linked model? I am not familiar with the API and deploying a script like this.

Answer: Here is an sample that selects the first RevitLinkInstance, retrieve its floors and hides them:

// Get a link
var filter = new ElementClassFilter(typeof(RevitLinkInstance));

var firstInstanceLink
  = (RevitLinkInstance) new FilteredElementCollector(doc)
    .WherePasses(filter)
    .FirstElement();

// Get its floors
filter = new ElementClassFilter(typeof(Floor));
var elemsFromRevitLinkInstance
  = new FilteredElementCollector(
    firstInstanceLink.GetLinkDocument())
      .WherePasses(filter)
      .ToElements();

// Isolate them
var refs = elemsFromRevitLinkInstance.Select( x
  => new Reference(x).CreateLinkReference(firstInstanceLink))
    .ToList();

uidoc.Selection.SetReferences(refs);

uidoc.Application.PostCommand(
  RevitCommandId.LookupPostableCommandId(
    PostableCommand.HideElements));

Many thanks to Lorenzo for addressing this need and sharing his helpful solution!