Change in ODBC Export Units

[robert.plummer]

Did the units in the ODBC export change? Previously our exports from Imperial projects resulted in decimal forms of Feet. With Revit 7 the same project now generates ODBC exports in Meters. Is there a setting that controls this? Is this the expected behaviour? We can update our databases to compensate for the unit change, but before we do, we need to find out that this is the expected behaviour moving forward.

Is there a list of all the changes to the ODBC export?

[Mencken]

I received this response to my question:

Thank you for choosing Autodesk Subscription. Here is the recommended resolution to your Support Request:

We received a very quick response from our product design team on this issue.

It was decided to change ODBC export to use metric exclusively. That decision came out of the need to support dozens of new unit types for structural, HVAC, electrical, data for future functionality. The main argument for using a single unit system is that it should be possible to write an application on top of our ODBC output once, and have it work with any Revit file regardless of the units used in the file. ODBC is more of a programmatic API. It was felt that anyone using ODBC output would have to do some amount of processing on the data anyway, so doing a unit conversion should not be a big burden -- not to mention that a unit conversion may have been necessary anyway, since for example we always exported lengths in feet or meters, but the application may have wanted inches or millimeters.


Best Regards,

Steve Burri
Autodesk Subscription Support Team