john pierson

Summary

In Revit 2023, we received a lot of improvements in Dynamo player. For a quick overview and a few other references, check out this post.

However, one big consideration while working in Dynamo player is, “How are you going to get input from your end-user?”. Luckily there are a number of ways to receive input data from your users. These currently include:

    • string
    • double slider
    • integer slider
    • number
    • bool
  • dropdowns (out-of-the-box ones primarily)
  • file path
  • Element Selection Nodes

What is interesting about this list is, that dropdowns are included but limited to the out-of-the-box variants. This is great but leaves a lot to be desired when we want selectable data in Dynamo player.

In this post, we are going to take a look at a use-case for the following node:

Node for setting text alignment.

Why?

The select horizontal text alignment node is interesting because it has hardcoded values for alignments. Luckily these values are output as string data. This means we can use this node for other uses, such as viewport title alignments.

In the past, we would typically have a user insert this information themselves, and we have to rely on that data being consistent.

What the string input looks like in Dynamo player

The downside to this is, what happens when someone types the alignment incorrectly or misspells it? (Eg. Cneter for Center).

This because quite cumbersome to manage in Dynamo and results in many nodes to counter this. Luckily, if we look at what is available to us, we have options.

 

Option 1:

Use an integer slider with constrained values.

As you can see, integer sliders are really great for controlling user inputs. However, this does require you to specify what each number represents, (which is really easy in Dynamo 2.13+ thanks to pinned notes!)

a constrained integer is a great way to control your user’s inputs

 

Option 2

Considering our view title alignments consist of Left, Right, and Center, we are able to use other nodes that are meant for different elements. This is where the text note alignment comes into play.

With this node in mind, we are able to do the following:

  1. Mark this as input with a description
  2. Pre-select an option (yay no more blank options!)
  3. Use this output in our viewport title alignments.

this node has all of the options we want (and no extra)

 

Putting it All Together

The end product of all of this effort is below. What we have is a graph that will align a view title to 3 positions on its parent viewport; left, right and center. In addition to this awesome new dropdown input we are using, this graph accounts for the current project’s units, (this graph is a byproduct of our previous Dynamo player post, Creating Dynamo Graphs That Adapt to Project Units).

Dynamo Graph to Set Viewport Title Locations

 

Video Overview

Sample Files

The sample Dynamo graph for this post can be downloaded here.