Deploy & Install: Manifest Loading

We talked about the encoding of the Revit manifest format previously and reached the conclusion that the UTF-8 encoding should be used in both the XML/AddIn file declarations and the Save As file encoding options.

In this post, let us see how to load and parse the Revit manifest file programmatically. It is not necessary to do so most of times but it may quite be in other times.

The following sample code will list out the information about the first found AddIn in the specified manifest file:

try
{
    XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(@"c:\temp\RevitAddinTest.addin");
    string info = "AddIn Information:\n";
    XElement node = xdoc.Root.Descendants("AddIn").First();

    info += string.Format("\tType: {0}\n",node.Attribute("Type").Value);
    foreach(XElement subNode in node.Elements())
    {
        info += string.Format("\t{0}: {1}\n", subNode.Name, subNode.Value);
    }

MessageBox.Show(info, "Manifest Loading Test");
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
}

If the specified manifest file looks like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RevitAddIns>
<AddIn Type="Application">
  <Assembly>C:\Temp\RevitAddin_δοκιμή.dll</Assembly>
  <FullClassName>RevitAddinTest.ExtApp</FullClassName>
  <ClientId>5ad0b84c-b30b-46fb-b9ff-f4bb4a90750a</ClientId>
  <Name>RevitAddin δοκιμή</Name>
</AddIn>
</RevitAddIns>

the output will be:

By the way, if the file encoding (e.g. Unicode) does not match with the AddIn/XML file declaration (UTF-8 here), an exception with the following weird message will be thrown out:

In fact, the problem can be checked through a much simpler way, opening the .AddIn file with the Internet Explore (IExplore.EXE). And the message will be much more meaningful:

Revit Manifest Organizer of RevitAddinWidget does something similar to the above, loading and parsing Revit manifest files, check their integrities, detect duplicates, and a lot more.

Deploy & Install: Revit Application Addin Manifest

Deploy & Install: Revit Command Addin Manifest

Deploy & Install: Revit Addin Roaming Folders

Deploy & Install: The Registry of Revit 2011

Deploy & Install: The Registry of Revit 2012

Deploy & Install: Where Are Revit Products Installed

Deploy & Install: Manifest Navigator of RevitAddinWidget

Deploy & Install: RegEdit Launcher of RevitAddinWidget

Deploy & Install: Revit Locator of RevitAddinWidget

Deploy & Install: Manifest Encoding

Deploy & Install: Manifest Loading

Deploy & Install: Manifest ClientId