Add hosted element area to parameters in Revit.

[ks-cph]

Description & motivation

Refers to Issue #3530
This change adds the Area of hosted elements within a host to a parameter. So far, no such parameter is available. This becomes especially important for windows and doors where the Area of removed elements can be essential. For instance, prefabricated timber elements are normally produced as a whole, and then these parts are removed, which is somewhat wasteful (even though they may be re-used).

Others will benefit from this change as such essential information is not yet available in Speckle.

Changes:

• Add a method to get the Area of a Hosted element in a Host
• Add the Area as a new Parameter to the Base object

To-do before merge:

We chose to use the approach described in https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2015/03/ifcexportutils-methods-determine-door-and-window-area.html. However, this solution refers to the Revit.APIIFC.dll which is not part of the Revit Converters or Dynamo Converters, yet.

• The code requires the RevitAPIIFC.dll

Validation of changes:

The contribution has been verified with several Revit models where windows and doors are added to walls.

Checklist:

• My pull request follows the guidelines in the Contributing guide?
• My pull request does not duplicate any other open Pull Requests for the same update/change?
• My commits are related to the pull request and do not amend unrelated code or documentation.
• My code follows a similar style to existing code.
• I have added appropriate tests.
• I have updated or added relevant documentation.

[martinromby]

Any comments for this PR, @AlanRynne or @teocomi?

[teocomi]

Hey @ks-cph @martinromby thanks for the ping, sorry this slipped through!
@bimgeek is looking to add a review for this in the coming dev cycles and we'll keep you posted 🙏
Thanks again for your contributions!

In the meantime please update with our base branch.

[martinromby]

Any feedback for us in the review @bimgeek ?

[didimitrie]

From a quick glance: my hesitation centres around performance as we're introducing a new calculation to this. I appreciate the need for precision in your case, but how strong is it?

[didimitrie]

note: this breaks sending of hosted elements that are not on a wall, will fix

[didimitrie]

Fixed the last few bits; and added a poc comment around the units - cutout area is always extracted out in meters, but that's all i have bandwidth for now. Maybe @clairekuang can help set them correctly?

We can consider merging this if @bimgeek discovers no large performance implications. Regarding our next gen connectors, how important is this number for y'all @martinromby? Since it's doing an extra calculation, we would extract this out as an opt-in extra setting, but ideally we'd not extract it out at all!

[ks-cph]

Having this knowledge, especially on windows and doors, is essential for reliable quantity-takeoff. We would therefore highly appreciate it if you could merge this in - potentially with the opt-in option.

[ks-cph]

Dear @didimitrie,

Have you made any decisions on how to progress with this PR, yet? It is a very relevant topic for us, and we have many users who would highly appreciate it if this feature could be supported. The opt-in solution works just fine for us!

Could you please let us know if we can expect this to be included at some point? Otherwise, we will look for alternative solutions.