Pyrevit: BCF support

[DuncanLithgow]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The problem is just that the only opensource bcf plugin for Revit, bcfier, is not actively maintained and not built on a cross platform library.

Describe the solution you'd like
BCF support built with Python. There's a brand new bcf python library in the https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/tree/v0.6.0/src/bcf which might integrate well with pyRevit to add this important functionality. All development on IfcOpenShell bcf support also supports BlenderBIM Add-on and (probably soon) FreeCAD

Describe alternatives you've considered
BCFier, but it can only ever realistically support windows based programs

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[eirannejad]

Nice! this is great! Thanks @DuncanLithgow

[eirannejad]

@htlcnn Hello! I see you are working on this BCF repo. Is this something we can ship with pyRevit?

[htlcnn]

@eirannejad Hi :) please continue discussing the features, user interface (some mockups) and how you want to ship the bcf module with pyRevit. I'll be more than happy to implement it :)

[eirannejad]

Per @DuncanLithgow comment, I'm thinking of including the bcf module under pyrevit/interop so developers can use it in their scripts

from pyrevit.interop import bcf

[htlcnn]

https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/blob/977df60f05d34e57a94158b9537bbc1dda03d87b/src/bcf/bcf/bcfxml.py#L10
https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/blob/977df60f05d34e57a94158b9537bbc1dda03d87b/src/bcf/bcf/bcfxml.py#L741
https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/blob/977df60f05d34e57a94158b9537bbc1dda03d87b/src/bcf/bcf/bcfxml.py#L743

These lines make use of xmlschema lib which supports Python 3.6+. I have to ask @Moult whether he wants to support older Python, then we'll find a solution.

[Moult]

@htlcnn I personally have no interest in supporting Python 2, which was end of life in April last year. However, if somebody wants to support it and will write the code to do it, I'm happy to merge PRs. If the code change is significant, then I would prefer it be maintained in a fork, if it is not significant, it can live alongside Python 3, but I won't personally take any effort to maintain it :) Go for it!

Is PyRevit still Python 2 for some reason?

[htlcnn]

@Moult for Revit, I find the most stable implementation is IronPython which is based on Python 2.7. pyRevit was developed mostly based on IronPython and have supported CPython recently, yet not very stable because of the maturity of the pythonnet lib that it uses. Sure I'll try not to break anything.

[eirannejad]

@DuncanLithgow I'm going to mark this as Enhancement for now, since you can always download the bcf python module and add it to lib/ directory of your pyRevit extension. We'll revisit this when there are more requests I guess. @htlcnn Thank you for the support :D Let me know when you think the bcf module is ready to be included with pyRevit