Accessing ‘Profiles’ Category

By Saikat Bhattacharya

When we edit a OmniClass number in a Family editor mode, there is a prompt window which lists all the Revit categories. One of the category ‘Profiles’ is not in the Document.Settings.Categories
list. How can we get access to the Category description for this 'Profiles' category?

Indeed it seems like the ‘Profiles’ category is internal and is not listed in Document.Settings.Categories using the Revit API. The approach to access this category is to use the BuiltInCategory.OST_ProfileFamilies (or BuiltInCategory code of –2003000) and then get access to this ‘Profiles’ category. The few lines of code included below illustrate this approach:

BuiltInCategory bic = 
        BuiltInCategory.OST_ProfileFamilies; // or (BuiltInCateory)(-2003000)
      FilteredElementCollector col = new FilteredElementCollector(doc);
 

      Category cate = col.OfCategoryId(
        new ElementId((int)bic)).FirstElement().Category;