Code Blue, Dr. Revit!-How to Resuscitate Corrupt Revit Models

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hello, everybody, my name is Nauman Mysorewala. @bimologist is my usual tag that I use for Twitter and Autodesk forums. And I used to use @cadologist, but times have changed. I had to upgrade my skills and went to another school, became a bimologist at that point. I worked for a company, GBBN Architects.

And Matt is also my presenter so I'm going to quieten this thing out a little bit so he can speak a little bit. I'm going to let him introduce him first.

MATT WUNCH: So my name is Matt Wunch. I'm a BIM technology manager for AI Engineers. I don't really like speaking about myself, so I'll just leave that up there, but I will say that I have been in AEC industry for 25, 26 years now doing pretty much everything from architectural, civil sites, infrastructure, structural, mechanical, technology, communication, security-- pretty much the works. Do you want to introduce yourself now?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I like to talk. I don't like to talk about myself, but at least I like to talk. Matt knows and a lot of people out there know that, unfortunately.

So we both are expert elites, which is basically, Autodesk's way of recognizing customers that have involved themselves in supporting RES products from the community side, so it'll be blogs, community forums, webinars-- many different ways-- social media, presentations, and local students, things like that are all involved in somewhat helping customers like you. So they recognize us. There were about 360-- I think they increased the pool-- in the world. So we were lucky enough to be inducted in it.

I also help Autodesk with they're webinar series, "Build Your AutoCAD IQ." And I proposed the "Build Your Revit IQ" series. And we got some support from Autodesk, so I worked with the Autodesk employees and did some presentations online with them during lunchtime and things. So that was pretty cool that I was able to work with Autodesk in that regard. And I'll get into the other things here.

Autodesk is starting-- this is more of an advertisement for the marketplace itself. I'm beta testing with them as well-- but the marketplace has gone live in a sense that for tech support and things like that, my files crashing, my AutoCAD is crashing, Revit crashing-- those type of stuff, you can always get tech support. You'll call your reseller, type thing. But let's say I need to get my models built or I need to get our templates updated or we need to figure out better workflows in our work. So that's what the whole marketplace is about.

And Autodesk basically connects you with people like you or me or some resellers or whatever. And you can just do negotiations with them, whatever the cost is. Autodesk just monitors that-- they don't take any cuts or anything like that. So that's a nice thing, service marketplace.

Then about our experience-- so why this came about. I love digging into INIs and I love digging into just troubleshooting type things, just trying to figure out, make software do what it can't do. Or some problem is I just need to figure out why. So that's my knack unfortunately and that led to some of the things that you will see, unfortunately.

We're going to dig into a little bit more surgery and stuff, but most of our experience recently has come from a program that started last year called Directly. Directly.com is a company, like a service provider, that connects companies like LinkedIn. If you have a question on LinkedIn, they get transferred onto an expert on Directly. Many other platforms use them. And Autodesk piloted that program and we were part of it.

And we saw tremendous-- should we say that?

MATT WUNCH: Yeah, unfortunately.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Unfortunately, we see a lot of corrupt models. Oh, my model's corrupt, my Revit is doing this, my Revit is doing that, my AutoCAD is doing this, my AutoCAD is doing that. I am going to mention AutoCAD too, but the whole point was that there were a few platforms that we as experts were supporting you guys. So when you submitted a ticket with Autodesk on their support, the ticket got rerouted on to Directly. And we get an email saying, hey, this guy needs help. My model's corrupt, unable to repair. Those type of questions.

And at least those are the only ones these days I look at and Matt will look at. And sometimes he'll ping me and I'll ping him, hey, Matt, that's up your alley. Or he'll ping me and say, hey, Nauman, you might want to take it. So we get compensated for our time, but servicing you guys helped us understand how to fix those problems.

So that was the biggest challenge, was trying to understand how to fix those problems. So we did a lot of research and things like that. And learned on our own, but the nice thing about that is I've heard-- anybody submitted a ticket through Direct and has gotten to Directly? You did. What kind of experience you had?

AUDIENCE: I actually got Matt.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Huh, OK.

MATT WUNCH: Was it a good experience, though?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MATT WUNCH: All right.

AUDIENCE: You responded within 30 minutes.

MATT WUNCH: And that's one of the big advantages for the Directly customers. The typical turn around for Autodesk is, what? 24, 48 hours before you get an initial response? This is less than four hours.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: In some cases, 10 minutes, and sometimes we close cases within 30 minutes, unless its a corrupt model where it's like, can you please upload your model? Because the model didn't come through or something like that, but big files, I mean you have to give us a break on that. And we also look at supported community forums and our work experience in general.

I just want to make sure everybody's in the room for what we are here for. We're going to try to figure out at least what's wrong with it. Learn to parse journal files and S-log files. When I started looking, there was very little information and through Autodesk was very, very sparse information, how to figure this thing out. So we did a lot of research in trying to crack the code, I should say. And figured out some stuff, not all.

And then we're going to get into resuscitating corrupt models. We can do some things where the model will open or not open, how to open it if it is corrupt. And things like that where we can do some tricks. And we're going to share those tricks with you. Hopefully you'll be able to-- the key why I think you are here or why I'm presenting this to you was, one, because we see a lot of these cases. That means people are having problems. If you see those, that means there is a downtime. Five people are waiting, 10 people are waiting, or it's just even one person that lost like 10 days worth of work or five days worth of work. So that's costing you money.

So I thought, this is a good way to kind of share our expertise with you guys and say, hey, maybe this will give you an idea to recover within your office quickly. That's the whole goal here. And then I'm going to give you some pointers, hopefully. They might be common knowledge anyways, but at least it's good to be doing diet and exercise to make sure you are healthy in your model. And your Revit model is an animal, I guess I should say that. And hence we're here.

So this must be your model or this is probably you and you're doing all that great stuff. And you're sitting on top of your model and guess what? Elements corrupt. And this is what happens. You end up being that. And then you end up there, at that point. But luckily, sometimes we can help you and hopefully you can recover like Homer, hopefully. That's our goal, to teach you guys.

So code blue-- anybody see these messages? Who has not seen it? Come on, give me a hand, who has not seen it? OK, we are in the right room, then. That was a positive test here, OK?

Yes, those messages that we see all the time. I can't sync, my Revit crashed, my this happened, I can't move my this-- you know, all those kind of weird messages that keep popping up all the time, unfortunately.

Signs of trauma-- well, those messages are some, but we also look at inabilities of sync. That's one of the biggest ones we see. I can't sync my model. Or when I sync it, it crashes. Or I'm editing a wall and it-- boom, Revit goes.

A lot of other times we see, if you open up a view or you try to change any properties of a view, boom, Revit just goes down. Purging, auditing models-- sometimes auditing models crashes, you can't even open the thing to audit it in the first place. And then the last one, unfortunately, is can't open the damn thing. It's just completely flat-lined. And we'll see what we can do about it maybe. Don't panic, OK? Please just take a breather, kind of slowly.

I love SpongeBob's freakouts videos. I wish I could have gotten all kinds of ones I could show you. Sometimes somebody in my office, will be, ah, please help me, Nauman! In the email, all capital letters. So my point is, don't panic, OK? Let's figure out a way to methodically see what we can do to isolate the problem and fix our model. That's the key. We want to get back to working in minimal time.

So the first few steps are to triage the model. I mean, just look at it. Get the vitals, diagnose it, what's happening. Who are the people in IT or BIM managers that are responsible responding to those type of thing? OK, good. I'm too. So that's good. Thanks for joining us-- and everybody else, too, by the way.

And then we'll go over some resuscitation methods and workflows that we use to help you guys on Directly when the cases come through or in our own workflows. And then the biggest thing is, be proactive. That's the one. You heard that preventative care, you know, you must see your doctor every year. Those who are in the US, maybe in Canada too, you have preventative care, but Revit requires that every week or maybe every few days if it's a large team.

So that's the biggest thing that prevents the first issue. So don't get there. It's like, don't let the cancer spread. I mean, literally some of those corrupt elements that we run into are cancerous. They just kind of constantly spread in the model and create those crashes down the road.

So then why does the model get corrupted? Most of the time it's your hard drive is full. You don't realize it, but Revit temp files are huge. And if Revit had crashed, guess what? Those temp files are left in the temp directory. So you'll run out of space. Or sometimes there is a hard drive error and it doesn't write that block. And it gets corrupted and then it gets synced to the main model, from the local to the central.

I'm going to mostly cover work-shared models, just FYI. The ideas are the same to recovery, but central model's recovery is a lot different. Not a lot different, but there is a completely different workflow. It's easier to do it on a central model, let's just say that-- for me, at least, and hopefully you, at the end of the class.

So one of the latest ones that I have seen is your connection. So we had a model in our office and it got corrupted. And I was trying to figure out why, why, why? And I'll show you the workflow. And basically, it was somebody who was working on a VPN and their connection dropped. It locked up the model for five minutes, then the connection happened, but somebody else did the interaction and just basically, Revit went [BLOWS A RASPBERRY].

And then one other thing is, when you're syncing to central, your program crashes. Well, guess what? It leaves the model a unstable state and that kind of leads to corruption down the road, too. And then bugs in the application. Oh, yeah, come on, there are no bugs. Geez, it's the germs, you know, you got to apply some-- what's it called? We'll talk about that. Use the gel, type thing. Those are my updates, by the way.

And some of the add-ins. There are tons and tons of add-ins, which is a good thing, and a bad thing too sometimes, because some of the add-ins aren't vetted. And they might interact with the database incorrectly and leave the model in unstable state. So sometimes that can cause-- and there has been examples if you go on the Autodesk knowledge network. There are some examples of add-ins or fonts doing weird stuff to Revit.

And then there is an article-- and it's in the handout-- I'm going to upload the most up-to-date version because I added a lot more examples to it last night, because there's one or two, but I wanted to give you a little bit more examples. So you can see my workflow, how I do it or somebody else does it, but Autodesk has a really good article on it too, as well. So you can search it out and it's in the handout, the link.

I'm sorry?

AUDIENCE: Is that a typo in the email address or is it really autod.sk?

MATT WUNCH: No, that's it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: .sk, that's a Bitly URL. So I use that a lot, because every time I shorten this, because I don't want to like-- [BEEP]. Autodesk has worked with Bitly, and so any time it sees some of the domains of Autodesk, it'll convert them into autodesk.sk, so there is no typo. Thanks for asking that.

Assess the basics-- just the steps. Just don't panic. The user will, trust me. Your job is to let them take some breaths, you know, that's what happens. First things first-- try the audit, do the purge, the basic stuff. Then if some of those things don't work, then you get into the journals. That's when I will kind of get into it. It's a little heavy stuff, hopefully you don't find it too heavy or get too bored or something, but we'll see.

And if all else fails-- I have had that last week-- too many elements missing. I could not crack that code yet. And I didn't get a straight answer from Autodesk. I was like, how do you guys do it? Yeah, we have our developers kind of take a look at it. They fix it, da-da-da. I was like, you know what? I have support Directly. I have to read out so many cases. Tell me, what do you do? Well, nobody get back to me, but last week, somebody did take my question seriously and answered.

Says well, no, we have a special developer bill that we use. All techs have access to it. So we can turn it around pretty quickly. Now, if you submit it to the support.autodesk.com, 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes we get it, we'll fix it sooner. I have our reseller, that's who I submit it through, because they have a back channel with Autodesk too, based on their status or whatever, and I had to get my model quickly.

So I sent them an email. It's like, this is ironic that I'm teaching a class next week, but you have to help me. How do you fix this? Because I haven't gotten a straight answer from you guys. They said, you can't really do anything, but yesterday, I got an email, Nauman, help! And I cracked the code on it, somehow, but if I get time, I will add that, because just figured it out yesterday. So I'll go hopefully on that.

So assess the basics: model vitals-- I'll let Matt talk on this and see, he can give you some ideas, Because I'm talking too much. I don't want to bore you.

MATT WUNCH: All right, so some of the basics. Obviously, can you open the model? Can you open the model using the audit toggle? Can you open the model using audit and/or isolating work sets? Maybe closing them all or just closing a few at a time, see if you can get in that way. Can you open the model by isolating it from the network? So it's not looking for any linked models or any linked DWG files.

This last one, I really haven't figured this one out, but there are times when I couldn't open a model, but if I renamed it, somehow that different current name from what was stored in the model itself, that allowed me to get into the model. So something you may want to take a look at as well.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Let me add one more thing. Sometimes when the syncs are not happening in that case, Jason here from CAD Micro something-- he has a blog said, oh, delete the S-log file. Like oh, that's a cool one. Sometimes will work too, because the read-write information sometimes get deleted too.

MATT WUNCH: Good to know.

AUDIENCE: When you say rename the file, are you specifically renaming the main central file? Are you copying the central before renaming it and saving it somewhere else?

MATT WUNCH: Yeah, what I would do is I would isolate it from the network. Just do copy-paste, it'll automatically add -copy at the end. There's your renamed file. Open it, you know, detach from central, et cetera. It may let you in, it may not.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Has happened with us. 5% of the cases we did had that. Again, just want to make sure you're clear, we don't work for Autodesk. So even though with Directly, just making sure you understand that the support that we are doing for Directly is as experts in the field, so people like you. So just want to make sure that we're clear here as well.

MATT WUNCH: All right, so moving on-- some of the system vitals. Some of these may seem pretty obvious, things you want to look at. Do you have the most recent updates for Revit installed? You can find those on your Account Management page. I recommend the Account Management page over the desktop app, because I'm sure many of you have fired up the desktop app and you just get the white screen the little blue dot spinning around. You don't get that with the Manage page.

Do I have the latest video card driver installed? That may mean getting the actual latest video driver or the latest certified driver. So you may end up having to roll back your driver.

Any recent Windows updates? There's been a huge uptick in .net 4.7-related issues. Now, that doesn't specifically mean that it's just net 4.7, because I've got a system where I have 4.7 and everything runs smooth. So there's some special configuration, some magical set of circumstances where it just doesn't work for a lot of people.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: One thing about the Windows update-- I always-- on Wednesday, I pray that I don't get too many calls, because typically Microsoft releases patches on Tuesday. And a lot of people will roll them out. Some of the bigger firms do a little bit more regression testing and things like that and figure out if they work or not, but even with IT department, they don't test Revit or AutoCAD or anything like that. So that happens.

And the biggest one, we kind of have a joke going on on Directly on our expert forum that's like, Fall Creator another edition is releasing next week, get ready boys or girls. Something like that. When the spring one released, I mean we had, [HIGH-PITCHED SQUEAK].

MATT WUNCH: There was a huge uptick in support tickets for that.

Do I have enough free space on my computer? He mentioned that earlier. Revit crashes, it leaves remnants behind. Clear out your temp folder, but in addition to that, check your journal folders as well, because you may see gigs and gigs worth of model data within the journal folder itself.

Run disk clean up as well, help just keep the computer clean itself.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Or delete some of the Windows update leftover files. So they'll be like 6-gig file that is for a major Windows update. Or you saw that Windows invading or Windows 7 getting invaded by that Windows installer for Windows 10 and left like 6 to 8 gigs worth of data on the hard drive. And it would download it every single time you deleted it.

MATT WUNCH: The last one here-- is the issue isolated to the user, the model, the computer? Have someone else log onto your system. See if they can access the model. It may be a Windows profile issue. It maybe your Revit profile. Just a couple of extra things to take a look at.

Check the Revit build version. Easy way to do that is through the Help/About dialogue box. And there's a nice link here that'll bring you the AKN page that has all the releases, what build number they relate to, so you can quickly tell if you've got the latest or not.

And of course, when it does crash, submit those CERs. It's going to have whatever your latest version is. It may kick back an email, say, hey, you don't have the latest. Go and download this. And based on a lot of these CERs, there have been numerous updates. They've seen a trend of, this thing is causing this issue. So Autodesk has actually gone ahead and released updates based on some of those.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Before you move on, make sure you add your email address, because when you create a support ticket with Autodesk, they search the CERs submitted with your email address. Or give them the CER number when you create that, because some of these, you can't help it. It's a bug in the software, there is nothing you can do about it.

So you want to make sure you report it to Autodesk, because if you people go ahead and cancel it, I would highly recommend-- I mean, there has been numerous updates. If you go do the Read Me on the updates, it'll say, these were fixed based on CERs that we saw. A very proactive monitoring on it. Very proactive in terms of when you submit the support ticket, they have all the dump data and everything-- if your company allows it and things like that. There are, of course, those real limitations, I understand.

And I have gotten an email two months later that says, hey, you were crashing on this thing and this update fixes it. That was one of those sunsetting things that Revit had in '17. And then two months later, I got an email saying, hey, it's been fixed, please apply this update. So it's usually very, very helpful.

So the next is let's look into resuscitating Revit, how we do it. And then we'll go into quickly-- I'll cover this-- the basics are sometimes, if it's crashing on you opening things like that, try turning off the hardware acceleration, reopen the model, try it again. Try to remove the video driver in the mix.

Sometimes resetting the Revit application setting helps. If you're clicking on a ribbon and it's doing weird things, that's one way to fix that. Repair the Revit installation and then launching Revit without add-ins. That's another really important one.

So within Windows, you can go into Programs and Add/Remove Programs-- it's Windows 10. I am a typer, so I don't even use these to go through now. I'm going to go through that way, because I don't remember how to get into it through the new Windows thing. I just kind of hate it. Sorry, I'm a typer. I'll show you some other shortcuts that I take a lot of times.

Let me just click on AutoCAD right now. The reason why I'm doing that is because Revit is running in the background and won't let me do anything. So click Uninstall Change. OK, well that goes my demo, but what it does-- it's the Windows update again, see? I told you they are the problem.

So there, you got the proof here, but you click Uninstall Change and basically, what it will do is allow you to quickly either try repair. That doesn't work, that will reset your settings to re-install. That doesn't work. And the part that we hate the most, Autodesk like, why don't you uninstall and reinstall?

I hate that. Always, in the past, every time something happened, have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I said, well, you can do the step-by-step. I know at the end of the day, the last one sometimes fixes the problem with those weird things, but the other one sometimes I do is with those-- this is Matt's workflow, but mine is very, very similar to it. In terms that we do is, we go in and go to the See Username App Data, that's where your Revit INI is kept.

Oh, sorry--

MATT WUNCH: You got a pointer.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey, I do have a pointer. Look at that.

So all this stuff right there. If you are an IT person or BIM manager or something like that-- I hate clicking opening things like 10 million ways. I have shortcuts on their desktop in a small support thing where it takes me directly to those things when I install their software, but in Windows, you can easily do Percent, App, Data, Percent. That very quickly takes you to the current user's roaming profile. And then from there, you can navigate through Revit, 2018, this is your folder where you're Revit INI is kept.

Now, before you delete the Revit INI or this folder or anything like that, Matt does recommend backing it up. Major backup that I really do is the INI file. I also look at the SHX font map, so if you use a lot of AutoCAD backgrounds, I have customized mine so anytime it sees Romanesque, it'll replace it with Arial Narrow, things like that.

So make sure you back those up and the biggest one is the keyboard shortcuts. Some user will kill you-- my shortcuts aren't working anymore! Yeah, because you deleted it, that's why. So before you do that, make sure you back that up. All you have to do is either rename this and launch Revit and it will recreate everything for you.

But other things sometimes we have seen, even with reinstalling, repairing, it still does not fix that issue. My recommendation is, if you are doing a repair or reinstall, delete the registry keys. Read all the Editing Registry is Dangerous and all that kind of stuff. So please take that, wear your gloves and everything.

MATT WUNCH: There is an AKN for a clean uninstall of Revit-- not just uninstall, but a clean uninstall, which will take care of a lot of the registry issues.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: REGEDIT is the command, those who know it-- who knows about REGEDIT? Oh, cool, that's awesome. This happens to be like-- I open my dialog and it's corrupt or does weird stuff. Or Revit crashes as soon as I open my dialog. And I kind of found out and I submitted the ticket to Autodesk about it. And then I think they do have a workflow still or no? No, they don't have that on the website still.

MATT WUNCH: I don't know.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: No, they don't have that cleaning. So under Revit-- it's in the document, OK?

AUDIENCE: You're in mobile machine right now. You might want to be in CU.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, you are awesome, thank you, sir.

MATT WUNCH: Give that man a ribbon right away.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. You earn it already. See, you can proudly say that now.

So I'm going to Revit 2018, '17-- doesn't matter. The biggest culprit right here is this workspace. That's where all the dialog box information is saved. So that is a good one to delete. And the UI which is in the app data folder.

Does anybody know how to rename your places thing? This is just a kind of quick side tip. I have created my shortcuts now and I want to delete that shortcut or the drive has changed and I can't. It's under Profiles on that dialog box, because you can't edit those if you right click and say-- those who know, this is a side thing. So when you say Add Places Favorites, this is where it saves it. So you can edit those paths and stuff here as well. So that's kind of a sidecrack on that one.

Corrupt families, I'll let Matt drive this one, because he is the expert on that.

MATT WUNCH: So there is an AKN article for this. I believe it's titled something along the lines of, "Can't Open the Model with Audit Toggled On." Basically, what you need to do is save out your families. You don't have to do it one by one by one by one. You can go to File, Save As, Library, Family. And it'll just batch process through this.

You have a video, right?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yes, just click next slide.

MATT WUNCH: So this is the basic workflow right here. Really simple-- File, Save Library, Family, you want to pick a location where it's safe to delete those files afterwards. You don't want to overwrite-- did it freeze? What's going on? Did it Iock up?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: No, I clicked-- maybe. So that's what happens.

MATT WUNCH: It goes on, right?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yes, it should. See, that's the wonder of technology. There you go. So that's what happens, basically. I will go back, yes. Sorry.

So this is where Matt is trying to tell you what the workflow is. And I'm supposed to get that.

MATT WUNCH: Did you have a little arrow pointing to the--?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I thought I did. Yeah, I did.

MATT WUNCH: Go back, go back. OK, right there.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Come on, I'm trying to pause, it doesn't pause.

MATT WUNCH: You got the bar in the way now.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, thank you, Nauman.

MATT WUNCH: Move it off the side.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: What, this side?

MATT WUNCH: When it crashes, it's going to show you the name of the file down here that it crashed on. Make a note of that name, open the model again, detach from central if you have to. Delete that family. Then go through this process again. If it finds another corrupt family, mark down that name.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: See?

MATT WUNCH: There we go, OK.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Thank you PowerPoint skills. Oh, I'm to blame myself.

MATT WUNCH: Give me your ribbon back.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Well, that's a PowerPoint thing. I can't give you my PowerPoint ribbon. Oh, I can give you my PowerPoint one.

MATT WUNCH: So there's the message. Here's the file that crashed the model. Make a note of that family name. Run through this process again. Do it as many times as you have to till you get your entire list of corrupt families. When you finally go through the process and everything's clean, if you have the original families still, reload those into your model, overwrite the existing ones. And that will clear up the corruption that's causing these families to either crash Revit when you purge, audit, click a view, something like that.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I finally figured out why it happens though, a little bit. I asked somebody at Autodesk and they finally explained me that because sometimes what happens is, some of the nested families get purged out or somehow they are part of a group. And then the group get messed up or something. It just, some reason, it puts it in a very unstable state where, if you have too many nested families, it's not a good idea. Don't go more than two nested beat, because it does have issues unfortunately.

MATT WUNCH: Is that whole nested family line is about in the journal file?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, you see that nested, nested, nested? That's what the problem is. There are way too many nesting and there's an issue with the nesting. So, we're learning new things too.

So this is my tool chest. That's what I use. That's my doctor's bag, I say. Notepad++, it's a free tool, awesome tool. There are other text editors you can use. There are many ways to use that. I have included some batch files that I wrote for you specifically, especially, because I use Notepad++, but not everybody is going to be.

So I'll show you a quick demo how you can use those, but some other Revit plugins that Matt and I use are-- pyRevit is a free GitHub thing and it's an awesome tool. We trigger it on only when we need it, because it has a little slow start-up process.

Family Size Reporter-- this is by Rutilities, something like that, but I use it a lot. It does help me figure out how many families I have, which families have import instances, because those are some of the bane of my problems through the slowness and whatnot and the geometry being corrupted, the SAT files that are weirdly done in old software that was just kind of added into a family.

And I also use Project Sweeper, it's like a two-buck-a-year, but there might be other tools that clean up the line type, things like that. And those are my tools and Matt's tools too.

But this guy right there, the Family Size Reporter, what it does is it kind of gives you an idea of what families you have. And I can actually do a demo on that. Sorry, I didn't want to bore you on just PowerPoints.

MATT WUNCH: We got 20 minutes left.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, shoot, OK, so we'll skip that a bit. We got to keep time, it's a one-hour class, we have so much material, unfortunately. So the document has everything listed in there too, as well, but this gives you a quick preview of it and whatnot.

So let's look at understanding journal files. So rather than me adding all the stuff that I have in the Word file, quickly go over some of the highlights in the journal file.

So there is not a whole lot of information on journal file and S-log. There are some things, but I wanted to at least highlight a few of the key words that I look for. Everybody know what a journal file is? Who does not know what a journal file is here? OK, so journal files are basically the debug files that Revit creates in the local app data folder. It's in the document, you can look it up there, where that is located, but I have a quick tip right there as well, how to get to it, but reading between the lines, how to figure out.

So first, we need to understand some terminologies, those -ologist and -ology. And what are those words, meniscus? And those kind of things. But the major things that are in the journal, there are two things major. One is a comment. The other one is the actual command that Revit uses to-- whenever you click on a dialog, whenever you issue a command, build a wall-- all those commands are recorded in the journal.

And the diagnosis of some of those commands as well. And that's what helps us. So all the comments-- the biggest one, JRN.XXX and then with a comma pair, that's the command. Anything with an apostrophe, that's a comment, diagnostic messages, time, information in the Revit, what the Revit is.

And then also the journal file was used till 2015-- and people still use it, but in the main Revit, there was an example of how to batch upgrade your families. Has been there till 2015 it was, and it was deprecated. And I'll have that in the document how to do it.

So this is what a journal file looks like inside. Journal and then this guy right there it says, Button. If you see just a blank line, that means it's a continuation of this command dialogue, any dialogues. Then it says, those are the two options available in the dialogue, but here you look at, what's the default? If you don't do anything, if you hit the Enter key, 1,001 will be the default, which is Detach Preserved Workset.

However, if you scroll down, we want to know what the user did. So we can find out that very easily what the user did. So this is how I read the journal files. And they went cuckoo me, somehow.

MATT WUNCH: Think you went a little too far.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I don't know how I did it. Maybe with this thingy I guess. Me apologies. Sorry, there's a lot of stuff in there, sorry. Hey, there you go.

So the user basically ended up choosing 1,001 at the end of the day. So you can look at what dialogues were presented to them. It also has basic hardware information, time stamp when the user started it, the build number-- Matt alluded to that, what that is already. Basically the same website thing, but this is how the build number shows up right there.

The S-log file also records the build numbers-- every user's build numbers. So I sometimes use that, because if you are people on multiple builds, it will crash Revit sometimes, it will corrupt the model. So if you have an S-log file, you just drag and drop that on the utility app provided, it'll give you a quick log of everybody's build numbers and their user names along with it.

This is the .net version installed-- whether it is installed or not in the first place, and then that's the version number of the .net installed, what driver version it is. I always had to figure out how in the world I connect the driver version in the Windows with the version that shows up on Nvidia site, mostly are Nvidia drivers, others I don't-- but that 32805, that's how it connects. The name of the video card, things like that-- whether it's certified, what build up Windows.

Then the basic thing is, when you run the audit command, how to interpret those results. Every audit command does this, begin content doc tree-- those hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, those equal signs. And then it's saying, hey, the family has some inconsistencies between the two. There are two families, one has different data than the other, so it's renaming one of them. That's what it says. That says content doc tree is corrupted. It fixes that. The audit will take care of it.

What's my time?

MATT WUNCH: We get 15 minutes, plus we got these things.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So these are the key words to look for. Debug Info-- these are mostly informational for the developers. And you get Addresses Failed-- this is basically saying, oh, I can't find the host. Debug Warn-- that's the bigger one. That's the most common one that we look for first. Debug Error refers to a major error-- major, major error.

Exceptions are another one that we sometimes look for. And in this case, if you look at this example, it says, see file exception. What that means is basically it cannot write to the hard drive. And that is probably why you could not sync or your file crashed or something like that, because it was interrupted because of a full hard drive.

Usually Revit will add an exception code at the end. We don't know what that means, the developers do. They can do things with it. That's all internal. I'm digging, don't worry. ESSchema, that's a schema-- sometimes you will see that when your project information is busted. Audit usually fixes that problem.

Crash-- so we will also talk about some proactive monitoring and stuff. If you start seeing crashes in the S-log file, you can actively monitor those easily, because everybody writes to those S-log file. You don't have, typically, access to everybody's journal files on the project team. So if they crash, that crash is reported in there. That's their user's session ID number. And as I said, I have another batch file that gives you the username and the session number for them. So you can quickly figure out what that username is right there.

AUDIENCE: Are these files kept near the central model then?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: The S-log file is in the central model back-up. I'll quickly show you where those are.

The Bad Geometry Error I've seen a lot in terms of AutoCAD files imported into the Revit family and the solids are kind of unstable and things like that. It will say-- oh, there is weird things or some planes are busted or reference planes that have lost their associations. You see those Bad Geometry Error, but those are sometimes you have to figure out what the error is.

The biggest one here is this Element ID number. And notice that there is this executive chair right there. That's says, problem. That has that issue with their geometry in their family. Either you fix the family, because the manufacturers included what they have included. And they have nested families that are also corrupted. They have some funky geometry with some parametrics or voids.

By the way, if you can avoid voids in Revit, avoid them and their families, because voids put a lot more heavier load on the system when they are generating a geometry. If you can use an excrugent, go ahead and do that. That's my recommendation. That's what I learned from somebody at Autodesk.

A few others-- Missing Element Number-- well, that one's been deleted from the model. And just in case they are corrupted sometimes, Revit will refer to those as well.

Guids are basic-- everybody know what a guid is? Guid is basically a unique identifier. It's a worldwide thing and every operation that Revit does has a guid associated with it, plugin, the model itself has a guid.

S-log files-- let me just quickly show what the items are in the S-log file.

OK, 10 minutes.

So basically, the project information-- you can read those. They are not that critical. What the critical is is this-- understanding that this greater than and less than is what says, this is the start of the action, that's the end of the action. What user ID, the build number that the user used, basically.

And then this as the utility I told you what it will do-- you just drag and drop the S-log file on it and it will generate very quickly something like this for you. And then you notice that in this case, this person is on the same build versus that person is not on the same build. So it's a good idea to make sure all are updated to the very latest build. That's one of the thing. Add those latest builds in there.

It has a session ID number, work sharing dialogue, read, write. Sometimes they lock the file and don't unlock. That means your model crashed or something like that and nobody can access it. That's what happens when the read-write transaction doesn't complete. And you can identify those.

STC-- every time person starts, there is a beginning STC. I have all the descriptions in there, Reload Latest, Safe to Local, and then Verification. And then make sure that you have a actually STC pair. There is also a utility that does that as well, where it gives you a list of all those items. Saying, make sure every one of them has a pair of open and close.