Avoid the “Missing Third Party Updater” dialog

By Joe Ye

Using the Dynamic Model Updater (DMU) mechanism, elements can be updated when other element is updated. After applied the DMU mechanism to a document, there will be a “Missing Third Party Updater” message box showing when reopening this Rvt file. The message text in the dialog is like:  The file <Rvt file name> was modified by the third-party updater. Unknown: <updater name> which is not currently installed. If you continue to edit the file, data maintained by Unknown: <updater name> will not be updated properly. This may create problems when <project name> is later opened when Unknown: <updater name> is present.

The message dialog is like this.

Question: Sometime users don’t want to see and handle this message box. How to avoid this dialog when opening a document that contains updater?

Answer: There are two kinds of updater according to whether it can let Revit display the “Missing Third Party Updater” message: Optional updater and non-optional updater. The optional updaters don’t let Revit display this message dialog. The non-optional updaters force Revit to display the message box.  You can change the updater type programmatically.

When register an updater, you can set it is optional or non-optional via the third argument.

public static void RegisterUpdater(      IUpdater updater,      Document doc,      bool isOptional    )

UpdaterRegistry.SetIsUpdaterOptional method can make an updater optional if the updater is already registered.

public static void SetIsUpdaterOptional(

UpdaterId id,        bool isOptional    )

If we don’t want to see the message  dialog,  we need to set  isOptional argument to true for all updaters.