How does an Indexer work with a FilteredElementCollector?

Question

I am reading data in from CSV text file where each line in the file is a distinct record. In that record is the name of a text style which I need to convert to the elementID of a TextNoteType.

I have a FilteredElementCollector to get a list of all text styles (as shown below) but what I need to do is pull an elementID from that based on the style name. I would rather not use a loop for that but something like a Python dictionary. For example: A = StyleList["stylename"]

Looking at this code snippet from Revit Python Shell:

ListOfTextStyles = FilteredElementCollector(doc).OfClass (TextNoteType)
a = ListOfTextStyles.ToElements()
a.Item

When I get to the point of typing "a.item" I see the following which suggests an indexer might be available to do what I want but I do not quite understand how...

Is it possible to do something like: a(property = "type name")["style name"] to get a TextNoteStyle element?

Michelle

Answer 1

Look at the definition of the FilteredElementCollector class. It is a generic collection of Element. So, an automatic indexer is available, and Item presumably returns an Element. If the current element is a TextNoteStyle, you can cast it to such and use its methods.

Sorry, I missed the (unnecessary) call to ToElements. Similar arguments apply there; it returns a generic List of Element.

However, there is mostly no need for the ToElements method. You can just leave it away. Doing so may even save memory and improve performance.

This question was also raised and discussed in the Revit API discussion forum thread on Indexer and FilteredElementCollector.