On August 1, 2016, Autodesk released a fix in Revit 2016/2017 software that eliminates a file-corruption problem we reported in late May. The problem occurred when both Ideate Sticky and UNIFI Content Management were installed on Revit 2016 or 2017. The Revit fix combined with the updated version of Ideate Sticky released in May solved the problem.
To ensure that your Revit projects continue to run smoothly, we’re providing an overview of the issue and links to the Autodesk Revit and Ideate Sticky update releases. We encourage all Ideate Sticky users to download both at the links provided below.
Overview of the Issue
In May, 2016, Guy Messick, Nancy McClure, and others from Interior Architects told us that that certain workflows involving particular versions of Revit, Ideate Sticky, and UNIFI Content Management were causing Revit projects to become permanently corrupted.
Ideate Software and UNIFI Labs worked together to find the root cause: a change introduced in Revit 2016 FCS allowed Ideate Sticky to interact with UNIFI events in ways that corrupt Revit projects. We discovered that the situation and actions outlined below caused the corruption to occur:
- Have Ideate Sticky and UNIFI installed on Revit 2016 or 2017. These exact combinations of versions are required:
- Using Unifi Content Manager, add a new wall or other system family to the Revit project
- Close the Revit project
- Reopen the Revit project
At this point, Revit stopped on File Open and displayed the error message, “Data in project <project_name>.rvt is corrupt and needs to be manually recovered.”
Scope of Risk
It’s important to understand that this issue could affect any combination of two Revit add-ins or custom programming. (Geeky details: Revit threw an exception when one add-in registered for the Idle event inside the Document Open event triggered by another add-in).
Problem Solved
Ideate Software released a new version of Ideate Sticky (2016.4 /2017.1) on May 20 that avoided the add-in interaction. We then documented and reported the issue to Autodesk. As mentioned earlier in this post, Autodesk released a fix that avoids the corruption (even if the latest version of Sticky is not installed) on August 1 in Revit 2016/2017.
A big shout-out to Mikako Harada of Autodesk Developer Technical Services for taking a personal interest and driving the quick turnaround at the factory to address this issue.
Get the Fix
- Update to the latest release of Revit (2016 R2 Update 6 -or- 2017 Service Pack 2):
Autodesk Revit Update Releases
- Update to the latest release of Ideate Sticky (2016.4 - or- 2017.1):
Ideate Sticky Update Releases
More questions?
Please contact Ideate Software if you are an Ideate Software user and have any questions. Also contact us if you are a third-party Revit add-in developer and think this issue might be affecting your software. We’d be happy to share what we know.
About the Author
Ben Bishoff, Senior Software Developer
Ben has been a software engineer for over 25 years. With a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, he has worked at several software companies developing applications for the AEC industry including Sage Timberline (construction accounting and estimating) and ArchT (architectural drafting for AutoCAD). He also worked at Microsoft creating AEC and other diagramming solutions for Office Visio. Ben has been with Ideate Software for over 8 years developing add-ins for Revit including Ideate Explorer and Ideate BIMLink.