Integration Guide

This page outlines how to get Dynamo to work with other software - if that’s of interest - fantastic, read on.

Notes to the reader

The aim is that this document and its examples are self contained. You’ll need to have played with Dynamo a bit, either the standalone version, or the Revit version, and be familiar with some programming, nothing too arduous though. Until we've had a bunch of people use the document, we expect it'll have bugs. If you have questions, please get in touch and we'll fold the answers in here. For extra kudos, feel free to send us a pull request with suggested improvements

Dynamo is a work in progress. We’re still improving how it works on a regular basis. This will break things from time to time. That said there are a number of folks build tools on top of it already, so there’s no need to wait. If you like, drop us a note and we’ll try and keep in touch before we do anything that causes you to need to do some work. The good news is that this state means that if there are things that don’t work for you we can, and will, look at changing Dynamo to make them better.

How to use this document

We want integrating with Dynamo to be a bit like buying sweets in a pick-and-mix shop. You only pay for what you take. Along this line there are a number of different ways of integrating, each offering more functionality, a tighter level of integration but needing a bit more work.

1. Import/Export
2. Zero Touch Import
3. .NET interop with support utils
4. Subclass Dynamo Application
5. Fork Dynamo

1. Import/Export

When to use: Use Import/Export when you need to get geometry into and out of Dynamo, but don’t need to add new functionality or change the way Dynamo works

Dynamo can import and export geometry as a SAT file. Simply create your geometry and select File, Export as SAT. You can then import this file into another application.

Below shows an example of what this looks like.

[TODO(lukechurch): Add UI screenshot]

2. Zero Touch Import

Dynamo can import and use .NET libraries with minimal modification and automatically present them as nodes. This is the easiest way of getting started with building an integration.

This document gives an introduction to this process. Please head there and return here when you’re done.

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Welcome back. By now you know how to go about writing some C# and have it appear as nodes in Dynamo. We use this mechanism for handling all our nodes in Dynamo.

If you’re writing some simple libraries, that all you’ll need to know. It’ll just work, however, larger applications often need a little more support. Starting with object life cycles.

Object life cycles, IDisposable