Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By : Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil
Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By: Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil

Overview of this book

Business intelligence software has rapidly spread its roots in the AEC industry during the last few years. This has happened due to the presence of rich digital data in BIM models whose datasets can be gathered, organized, and visualized through software such as Autodesk Dynamo BIM and Power BI. Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data helps you understand and implement computer science fundamentals to better absorb the process of creating Dynamo scripts and visualizing the collected data on powerful dashboards. This book provides a hands-on approach and associated methodologies that will have you productive and up and running in no time. After understanding the theoretical aspects of computer science and related topics, you will focus on Autodesk Dynamo to develop scripts to manage data. Later, the book demonstrates four case studies from AEC experts across the world. In this section, you’ll learn how to get started with Autodesk Dynamo to gather data from a Revit model and create a simple C# plugin for Revit to stream data on Power BI directly. As you progress, you’ll explore how to create dynamic Power BI dashboards using Revit floor plans and make a Power BI dashboard to track model issues. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to develop a script to gather a model’s data and visualize datasets in Power BI easily.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Overview of Digitalization and BIM Data
5
Section 2: Examples and Case Studies from Experts around the World
10
Section 3: Deep Dive into Autodesk Dynamo

Chapter 8: Deep Dive into Dynamo Data Types

In Chapter 5, Getting Started with Autodesk Dynamo and Data Gathering, Luisa did an excellent introduction to primitives such as strings, Booleans, and integers. In this chapter, we are going to deep dive a little more into Dynamo data types. We will need to learn how to perform more complex operations on strings, lists of strings, lists of lists, and so on because they are essential in our day-to-day script development. So, for example, we will answer questions such as the following:

  • If I have a list of lists, how can I precisely select one item or a list of items?
  • In a list of strings, if there is part of each string I want to update, how do I tell Dynamo to do that?
  • If I want to split a list into two groups, should I use if statements?
  • Also, if I want to perform naming rules validation, how can I do that?

Besides that, we will also focus on lists, indexes, how they work, and how to manage them. We will also...