Is there a way to explore the Revit file?

[davidwhitehill]

I have a very large file (180-200MB). We purge consistently, and compact, and follow the guidelines on the forum (generally).

Unfortunately, when you purge, families, and nested families are not purged. You have to open them individually and purge them, which can be very time consuming.

Is there any way to look into the Revit file to see which families are taking up the most space, to concentrate our effort?

[truevis]

There is an API sample called Explore DB or such. It can be compiled and run. It lets you click down into an RVT's database.

You could also try exporting to ODBC and looking at it with Access, etc.

[DoTheBIM]

Do I remember some tool or app or ini setting that would allow you to save out families from a project? If so, you could do that and then search the families and sort by file size then edit as needed and reload them back into the project. I'll have to search a bit on that.

[DoTheBIM]

Here's what I remembered seeing...

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=59785

However I can't seem to get it to work in 2009. Must of been disabled.

[stephanschneller]

You could do a "save as" and give it a different name, this should reduce the size quite a bit.

Regards,

Stephan

[tonyisenhoff]

Ideate has a great tool for looking & selecting within the model. It's called Ideate Explorer. It lets you see and select objects in your model that you typically can't. We use it all the time...

http://www.ideateexplorer.com/index.php

[DoTheBIM]

I've been able to export all families from a project (v2009) using a Shortcut Highway and then produce a journal file to apply it to other files. Autodesk doesn't support any of what I've done, but if you still need to find out what families are huge... you would be able to export them all to a folder and sort them by size to focus your effort on the largest ones... In contrast. I have a detail component that is 728kb where the comparison one in Autodesk's content is 152kb. I've purged and saved as and the size won't come down... the only thing extra in it is a filled region... I'm wondering if this might be the result of upgrading rather then starting from scratch.