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

Preparing Microsoft Power BI

Looking back at our initial purpose, we would like to deliver a simple new functionality to enhance data collection without increasing any efforts by our Revit users. That's why we choose to take advantage of their daily activities by setting the software to listen at Synchronizations event to trigger Command 4 automatically. As soon as someone syncs their model with the central one, we will collect new data and deliver it to the Power BI service.

In our class MyExternalApplication.cs, there is a pre-defined method named application_DocumentSynchronizingWithCentral at line 33. This method has been added to the list of functionalities, and it will be triggered every time on document synchronization (line 20 of the same file).

Now that every configuration step has been completed, our flow works better, but our puzzle still needs one last piece. We have to set up the web service on which our plugin should collect and send data.

To get started...