Known Issues

The following known issues have been identified in Ideate Automation. If you encounter anything that is not listed here, please first check that you are running the latest release. If you are, we would appreciate a report about any unwanted behavior, as well as suggestions for improvements or new features to [email protected]

Autodesk Cloud (BIM 360) Login Error

An issue has been reported that on some virtual machines the MS WebView2 Runtime may not be installed or may be disabled to save resources. In this case the Autodesk Cloud login will fail. Please review the article here for more info and download links for the component: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

Revit Pop-Up Dialogs

Ideate Automation is designed to suppress all Revit pop-ups where feasible as described on the Pop-up Suppression page. There are some known conditions where these pop-ups cannot be suppressed and therefore will interrupt Ideate Automation. 

Autodesk Desktop Connector

Due to the lack of API for the Desktop Connector we have not yet been able to suppress some dialogs. You can vote on this topic here: Autodesk Construction Docs/ aka BIM 360 Local File API

In many cases, updating your Autodesk Desktop Connector installation will correct these issues.

Other Revit Dialogs

Printer-specific dialog during DWG/PDF export. As shown below, this pop-up can occur when you have a physical printer set up as the default printer and that printer doesn’t support the specified DWG/PDF default settings. This message is typically triggered by the AUT-DWG or AUT-PDF scripts which utilize the export setups. As a workaround you can use the dynamic version of these scripts (assuming you own Ideate BIMLink): IBL-DWG and IBL-PDF which do not have the same requirement.

Bentley ProjectWise Add-in

The Bentley ProjectWise Add-in is available for multiple versions of Revit and causes Ideate Automation scripts to fail. The workaround is to uninstall this addin. Related Autodesk topic: Unable to open Revit file after installing ProjectWise.

BIMLink IBLGetLinks Fails to Import Similar Link Name

The IBLGetLinks command option to import a link when it does not exist uses a simple “Contains” search on the name instead of using the “exact match”. This means, for example, that if a project contains a link called “Sheets 1” but the Ideate Automation scripts includes command option to import “Sheets”, it will not be imported due to the presence of “Sheets 1”.

The workaround is to either use the advanced command option to “Always use external link.def” or to ensure that no other loaded link definitions contain the full matching word (e.g. “Sheets1” instead of “Sheets 1”).

Export Fails if Destination Path Contains a Comma — Fixed in 3.1

A task that is producing a file export will fail if the destination path contains a‘comma’ character (“,”). The task log will contain the following DEBUG line: “Unexpected response format received”. If such a path must be used, a set of updated script files have been released that addresses this condition. Download, unzip and copy the files into “C:\Program Files\Ideate\Ideate Automation\en-US\Samples”. You can ‘repeat’ the task that failed previously (R-click menu) and it should work. The scripts in the package above are identical to the built-in 3.0 content in all other aspects.

Export fails because of invalid characters

Certain characters that are not allowed in file names can still be used in Revit as part of parameters. The most common example is a “/” when used in sheet or view names. When running a task that would result in a file named based on such parameter (e.g DWG or PDF export), there will be no file created, and the log will indicate an error listing ‘invalid characters’.

Unnamed Task in the Task History

Tasks created in previous versions of Automation or tasks where the script file was edited by the end user may be labelled as ‘Unnamed Task’ in the Automation Task History. These tasks may still function correctly in every aspect, but they are missing the ‘task name’ property first introduced in Automation 3.0. Recreating the task using the latest built-in script version would add the correct property. For help with custom scripts, please reach out to [email protected].

Unable to edit a Scheduled task

Scheduled tasks created by the user directly in Windows Task Scheduler have very limited edits allowed to them through the Automation UI. For security purposes, Windows only allows the original creator (or the user directly) to edit a scheduled task. You can use the Clone command onthe Task History to recreate the task as a native Automation 3.0 version.

Task fails if it cannot accurately determine the Revit file version 

This known issue refers to Automation 3.0 or later. If you are still using version 2.1, please update to the latest as the first step.

Known causes and workarounds:

A BIM360/Autodesk Cloud model has been upgraded but not yet published.

The specified file cannot be found in the Live Cloud Models list on the Files tab.

The previous file version is still present in the Revit ‘Recent Files’ list.

IFC linked file options

There is an option in the Revit IFC Export setup under Additions Content to Export linked files as separate IFCs. Ideate Automation does not currently support that option but does allow you to add multiple Revit models to the file list for one Automation Task.

Beginning in Revit 2024, these options were updated with two additional configurations and a new drop-down menu as shown in the image below. The new options to Export in same iFCProject and Export in same iFCsite are also not yet supported at this time.

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