Handling Duplicate Types on CopyElements

By Augusto Goncalves

When using the ElementTransformUtils.CopyElements you may have the ‘Duplicate Types’ warning, as shown below.

In fact this method have one override option to pass a CopyPasteOptions parameter that enable us to control how Revit will react when this happens. We can return one of the following:

• UseDestinationTypes: Proceed with the paste operation and use the types with the same name in the destination document. 
• Abort: Cancel the paste operation. 

To implement this, first create a new class that implements the interface IDuplicateTypeNamesHandler. This class should have one method that returns the action. In the sample below, it will use destination types.

public class CustomCopyHandler : IDuplicateTypeNamesHandler{  public DuplicateTypeAction OnDuplicateTypeNamesFound(    DuplicateTypeNamesHandlerArgs args)  {    return DuplicateTypeAction.UseDestinationTypes;  }}

Then, at the CopyElements call, create a object of the type CopyPasteOptions and set the handler.

// create an instanceCopyPasteOptions copyOptions = new CopyPasteOptions();copyOptions.SetDuplicateTypeNamesHandler(new CustomCopyHandler()); // now the copyElementTransformUtils.CopyElements(doc1, ids, doc2, Transform.Identity, copyOptions);

Thanks Arnošt Löbel for his post at our forums.