Dynamo Data Pushing: BCFzip to Excel

Just a quick example of some data pushing that's got nothing to do with Revit. Every now and then I got to work with other software, and recently I've been using Novapoint a lot in a large infrastructure project here in Norway. Novapoint got a tool for collaborating and get messages around the team called Topics. If you have used Infraworks, the equivalent would be the Design Feed. The key difference between the two is that in Topics you can add a lot of metadata, like status, priority, assigned to, labels and so on.

Now, we used this in a rather organized matter for Quality Control of our models where the file name of the different models would correspond to the title of the Topic. This way the whole team could observe, at any time, where in the process the different model files were.
However, Topics could only export to BCFzip and pdfs. While export to BCFzip is awesome, I needed to be able to wrangle this data into Excel.

Dynamo to the rescue, again.

A half hour of scripting and we can automate the data extraction from yet a different format. Pretty specific script but hopefully someone can put it to good use.

You need the following packages for this to work:
- Lunchbox, if you don't got it already, get it.
- Zebra, a lot of useful string functionality beyond Dynamos own capabilities.

BCFzips contain a folder for each Topic and a XML file containing the markup of that topic in each folder. If we utilize the XML functionality of the Lunchbox package and some string management nodes from the Zebra package we can get to the data we need.

All in all, just a quick example yet again of Dynamo automating a task for the slackers among us..