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

Getting to know regular expressions

As we said previously, regEx, or regular expressions, can check, match, replace, and manage strings. A regular expression consists of encoded strings that we can use to find patterns in large amounts of data. Using regEx can save us many hours of work instead of using string operations, like the ones we learned in the previous sections. Also, this section will not be a deep dive into regEx as it deserves a book on its own.

Let's get started by opening Dynamo and creating a new file. If you've followed the previous section, you should have Clockwork already installed. If you didn't, open Package Manager and install the Clockwork package as it includes a few nodes that allow us to use regular expressions. As an example, let's see how we can take advantage of regEx to parse phone numbers. Let's say we have a list of phone numbers, and we want to check whether or not they match the following convention:

3 digits, 1 dash...