Tag: transmit

Solving a Local vs Central Revit Link Problem with View Templates

Luke Johnson

Revit Wants you to transmit ‘detached copies’ of Central files for linking into other models. If you ignore this and transmit your Local copy instead, Revit always remembers where that instance of the Local file was saved, and it causes havoc in a federated model situation. You can use the free CTC explorer extension to quickly check this:

Or you could use Dynamo with my Bakery package:

 Hypothetically, let’s say you have received a file from a consultant, and after reloading you realise it was a Local file, not a Central. Now, your federated model may already have changed the name of the file to match whatever the local was called. Let’s say this problem has caused another problem: multiple instances of that same model have been loaded into this file.

If you are using View Templates, only one of these instances will be the point-of-truth for your View Template Revit Link Overrides. Time to get out your magnifying glass and investigate. Firstly, we will create multiple copies of the RVT file with different names, and then use Reload From (in Manage Links) to get these loaded into the current Revit session. This will create a Local alias:

Now, only one of these is the historical, correct link in the context of this federated model. How do we know which one to keep and which ones to remove?

We can use our View Template Revit Link Overrides to tell us… after all, they are the reason we are going through this process, right? We want Revit to ‘remember’ the overrides we have made in those templates. So let’s have a look at the View Template and see what it tells us.

Basically, by reviewing the Custom overrides here, I was able to determine which version of the Link to keep. It just so happens that the correct historical link had:

  • a lower number as its instance name (shown above as 149), and
  • a lower number as its element ID (450048 compared to 1288492). I found this by using Project Browser, Select All Instances – In Entire Project and then Manage – IDs of Selection

The above two ‘numerical’ investigative methods are probably not 100% reliable, but they may give you a good idea of which link instance is older in terms of this project.

Now, simply Remove the wrong links using the Manage Links dialog, and be aware of not re-linking multiple new instances if you just so happen to get a Local copy from someone in the project team. And remember…

What does Revit Want? Central copies for linking purposes.

eTransmit for Revit – archiving made easy

Luke Johnson

I actually don’t need to transmit RVT files too often (yet).  However, I often want to archive a ‘snapshot’ of all the data associated with a project.  eTransmit for Revit makes this possible – and relatively easy.  I recently used it to archive a project, and the resulting folder contained 235 files!

Obviously, you need to be on Subscription to download.  Here are the links:

eTransmit for Autodesk Revit 2012 Extension 2012-05-31

eTransmit for Autodesk Revit 2013 Extension 2012-05-10

One interesting error that I came across was:
A file with the same name but a different path has already been transmitted.

Here are items eTransmit currently includes:

PS – I remember how excited I was when I first saw eTransmit for AutoCAD!  I’m not that old, am I?

eTransmit for Revit 2012

Luke Johnson

New free tool available on Labs for Revit!  It basically allows you to bundle up a project for easy transmission to another party.

Here is the description from the Labs page:
eTransmit for Revit is a technology preview of an add-in application for Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2012, Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2012, and Autodesk® Revit® MEP 2012 software.


For best results, installing Revit 2012 Web Update 1 is recommended. // more


With eTransmit for Revit, you can:


Copy and detach a Revit model and associated files to a single folder for internet transmission. This removes the typical error messages when you copy central files using the operating system.


Locate dependent files automatically and include them in the transmittal folder, reducing the possibility of error. All dependent files are automatically converted to use relative paths to ensure that the dependent files can be located by the model.


Choose to include related dependent files such as linked Revit models, CAD files, DWF markups, decal images, and external keynote files. You can transmit any Revit (.rvt) model that has been upgraded to Revit Release 2012.


Transmit models that are using file-based worksharing or server-based worksharing. eTransmit for Revit will also work with non-workshared Revit models.

Some of the new features in Revit 2012 start to fit into place now (such as the ability to Import Linked CAD files).

Here is the link again:
Autodesk Labs Utilities eTransmit for Revit

And here is some more info from the Labs page.

menu View the eTransmit dialog box.
Download the known issues document (PDF).

Large files and emails…they don't mix

Luke Johnson

Revit makes it very easy to produce a LOT of drawings. This can result in a large deliverable. In one recent case, our Tender Issue of drawings consisted of 132 A1 sheets. Using CutePDF (with a couple of handy tweaks), we printed these to a PDF file of around 48 MB.

Depending on your email size policy, a file of this size would take anywhere from 5 to 16 emails to transmit.

To avoid this eventuality, I have explored various options for uploading large files and making them available to our colleagues. FTP seemed to be the answer, but one of our Clients is behind a proxy or firewall system that doesn’t allow FTP access – even with an anonymous account! So it was back to the drawing board…

Therefore, I decided to setup a HTTP server for file access. I downloaded Apache 2.2 (for Windows, without SSL). I took the following steps:

  1. Allowed a port through our firewall and directed it to the PC running Apache. We have a static IP, so I could now access Apache by typing in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:portnumber.
  2. Ensured that the opened port setting matched the Apache port in the httpd.conf file
  3. Disabled the ‘Indexes’ feature for a subfolder of the Apache ‘root’ folder (in my case this was C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache2.2htdocsFILES).
  4. Created a password for this folder using htpasswd.exe
  5. Enabled password access to the same folder using the following text in httpd.conf

    directory>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName “Restricted Files”
    # (Following line optional)
    # AuthBasicProvider file
    AuthUserFile “C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/password/.htpasswd”
    Require valid-user
    directory>”

Now I can login to the PC running Apache, copy any file I want to serve via HTTP to the password protected folder, and then send a link to any of our colleagues that I want to gain access to this file.I also setup Filezilla FTP Server on another PC in our network, and forwarded port 21 through our router to this PC. I setup a user for a folder on this PC, and disabled all rights apart from ‘read’.I can now send an email that contains two hyperlinks to any large file we wish to transmit, one for FTP and one for HTTP. Both of these links are password protected.And all of this is done using free, open source software!