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Filter elements in Revit and set parameter

Hello everybody,
around two or three month ago I started to learn Dynamo for Revit... finally :)
After learning and testing a lot, I got a few own scripts working. Then I learned Python, because I couldn't create the next script only with Dynamo-Nodes.
Then I thought "Let's see how difficult it is to get something done as a PlugIn".
I watched some Videos and read a lot of stuff.
Finally I got the Revit-AddIn-Wizard installed and made my first small Test-PlugIn.
Great...
Now I have a few problems which I do not understand... so I thought I will try my luck here... because I got so much information and help, reading through this site.
My goal was/is the following: (I tell you what I have now)
A form with a few buttons, comboboxes and a DataGridView.
I can load an Excelfile, click on "Show" to show it in the DataGridView.
The header of each row will be automatically put into 3 comboboxes.
In the first combobox you select the first search-parameter, in the second you CAN select another search-parameter and in the third combobox you select the parameter you want to set.
I have a checkbox to switch from type- to instance-parameter for the search- and the set-operation.
There is also a button which shows another small form with a list of categories (I won't search for ALL, only nearly all modelcategories).
PlugIn
I took me a lot of "watching Videos, reading through the internet, testing, testing and testing".
Thanks to this site here and a few others... I managed to get this whole PlugIn nearly 100% working.
But now I have a few strange issues and I have absolutely no clue on how to fix them or if it is possible. And I really hope that someone can help me.
First... I just tell you my problems and perhaps someone can say "this really IS an issue!" or that it is possible to get it done. Then I would post some code.
So... what do I do?!
1. I have a FilteredElementCollector which filters ALL elements.
2. Depending on my "Type/Instance-Checkboxes" I do .WhereElementIsElementType OR .WhereElementIsNotElementType.
3. Then it passes a MultiCategoryFilter to get the big list down to only the modelcategories.
4. Next, the collection passes one of ten different "methods" depending on all settings. There I filter this collection depending on the searchlists-comboboxes. When the combobox says "Familie" or "Typ" then it filters for ".BuiltInParameter.SymbolFamilyName" or ".Name" otherwise it just uses ".LookupParameter".
After that I have a collection with only the elements of selected categories which contains the values from the Excellist.
5. Depending on what my search- and set-settings are (e.g. search for type and set instance) I have to get the instances from the collected types or the other way around.
6. Then I pass it down to another method where I finally set the parameter.
So... Excelheader goes into comboboxes, depending on what you select in there it creates lists with the values of the selected rows.
I hope you all understand.
Now... where are my problems?
When I search for type-familynames or instance-parameter and set a typeparameter it works for ALL categories without any error.
1. When I try to set an instanceparameter (doesn't matter what my search-setting are) it works for all "normal" families but not for the systemfamilies (e.g. walls, floors, pipes etc.). No error, just nothing happens WHY? It seems that I cannot set an instance-parameter for system-families.
2. Roofs, Stairs, CurtainPanels and GenericModel make problems when I search for a typeparameter Error is something like "The object reference was not set to an object instance". Only with these 4 categories and it doesn't matter what I want to set... but when I search for family-/typeNAME or Instance-Parameter, then I can set type or instance and it works (except instance for sysfam).
3. When I try to search AND set an instance-parameter it works for ALL categories EXCEPT if one wall does not contain a search value... it really is enough that ONE wall does not have a search-param-value that everything will be cancelled.
I have a few other small problems... but I hope someone can help me with these problems... I would be extremely thankfull
greetings and have a nice day or night :)
Philipp

Tl; dr.
The three problems you describe sound like your own. I have no heard anybody else runAsk three separate questions and provide three separate minimal code snippets describing how they arise,. into those. I suggest that you create three separate independent minimal reproducible cases to demonstrate all three issues. Chances are, when you simplify and minimalise your code, the problem will go away. If it does not, it might just possibly be in a small and manageable enough state for other people to help you take a look at it. Given the long-winded description above, nobody in the world can help you.

Thank you for your answer Jeremy,
as I said, as a first start it is ok for me if you don't say "With theses categories, there are indeed some issues!"
I think I've managed to create 3 small examples of my problems.
For each problem I made a zip-file containing the complete visual-studio folder, a small exampleproject and a readme.txt with (I hope) enough information to understand everything in detail.
Problem1
Problem3
You only need to compile them or copy the .addin and .ddl files into the Revit AddIn folder. Then you get the new ribbons.
Short problem summary = I get problems when searching for parametervalues and setting values to another parameter.
Edit: I just solved the 2. problem when searching for familynames and setting system-families-parameter.
I used:
ElementClassFilter ecf = new ElementClassFilter(typeof(FamilyInstance));
FilteredElementColletor colle2 = new FilteredElementCollector(doc);
colle2.WherePasses(ecf);
I simply deleted the ClassFilter and do it now like in the other cases where I need instances.
FilteredElementCollector colle2 = new FilteredElementCollector(doc);
colle2.WhereElementIsNotElementType();
The 1. and 3. problem still exist :/
I would be thankful for any help someone can provide :)

Powerpoint "Save As Picture" from C# Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint

My question is pretty similar to this one and I'm afraid the answer is the same... I want to save all the shapes/images on a slide as a single png (or jpeg). Programmatically, I get as far as
slide.Shapes.SelectAll();
but don't see a way to save as image. Is this possible? If not, any other suggestions, hopfully w/ examples? (not VBA - I need to automate the whole conversion)
There was a reference to OpenXML in the other post, but I'm not even sure how to pull that in.

I don't know how you'd do this in C# but I'd guess that you'd make use of the same methods as you would with VBA, where you can do:
Activewindow.Selection.ShapeRange.Export( "c:\temp\delete-me.jpg",ppShapeFormatJPG)
ppShapeFormatJPG is a PowerPoint constant, a VBA Long = 1; IIRC that'd be an Integer in C#.
The method also can take two more optional parameters, scalewidth and scaleheight, which govern the width and height of the exported image in undocumented ways. By default, no parms supplied, I get exports at 72 dpi. Larger numbers result in higher pixel count exports but distorted proportions. I'm sure there's some strange logic to it, but it escapes me; all hints welcome!
There's a third optional parm, ExportMode. In my tests, it makes no difference whether you supply it or not, and if you do, which of the available values you choose.

natural language query processing

I have a NLP (natural language processing application) running that gives me a tree of the parsed sentence, the questions is then how should I proceed with that.
What is the time
\-SBAR - Suborginate clause
|-WHNP - Wh-noun phrase
| \-WP - Wh-pronoun
| \-What
\-S - Simple declarative clause
\-VP - Verb phrase
|-VBZ - Verb, 3rd person singular present
| \-is
\-NP - Noun phrase
|-DT - Determiner
| \-the
\-NN - Noun, singular or mass
\-time
the application has a build in javascript interpreter, and was trying to make the phrase in to a simple function such as
function getReply() {
return Resource.Time();
}
in basic terms, what = request = create function, is would be the returned object, and the time would reference the time, now it would be easy just to make a simple parser for that but then we also have what is the time now, or do you know what time it is. I need it to be able to be further developed based on the english language as the project will grow.
the source is C# .Net 4.5
thanks in advance.

As far as I can see, using dependency parse trees will be more helpful. Often, the number of ways a question is asked is limited (I mean statistically significant variations are limited ... there will probably be corner cases that people ordinarily do not use), and are expressed through words like who, what, when, where, why and how.
Dependency parsing will enable you to extract the nominal subject and the direct as well as indirect objects in a query. Typically, these will express the basic intent of the query. Consider the example of tow equivalent queries:
What is the time?
Do you know what the time is?
Their dependency parse structures are as follows:
root(ROOT-0, What-1)
cop(What-1, is-2)
det(time-4, the-3)
nsubj(What-1, time-4)
and
aux(know-3, Do-1)
nsubj(know-3, you-2)
root(ROOT-0, know-3)
dobj(is-7, what-4)
det(time-6, the-5)
nsubj(is-7, time-6)
ccomp(know-3, is-7)
Both are what-queries, and both contain "time" as a nominal subject. The latter also contains "you" as a nominal subject, but I think expressions like "do you know", "can you please tell me", etc. can be removed based on heuristics.
You will find the Stanford Parser helpful for this approach. They also have this online demo, if you want to see some more examples at work.

Data structure for searching strings

I am looking for the best data structure for the following case:
In my case I will have thousands of strings, however for this example I am gonna use two for obvious reasons. So let's say I have the strings "Water" and "Walter", what I need is when the letter "W" is entered both strings to be found, and when "Wat" is entered "Water" to be the only result. I did a research however I am still not quite sure which is the correct data structure for this case and I don't want to implement it if I am not sure as this will waste time. So basically what I am thinking right now is either "Trie" or "Suffix Tree". It seems that the "Trie" will do the trick but as I said I need to be sure. Additionally the implementation should not be a problem so I just need to know the correct structure. Also feel free to let me know if there is a better choice. As you can guess normal structures such as Dictionary/MultiDictionary would not work as that will be a memory killer. I am also planning to implement cache to limit the memory consumption. I am sorry there is no code but I hope I will get a answer. Thank you in advance.

You should user Trie. Tries are the foundation for one of the fastest known sorting algorithms (burstsort), it is also used for spell checking, and is used in applications that use text completion. You can see details here.

Practically, if you want to do auto suggest, then storing upto 3-4 chars should suffice.
I mean suggest as and when user types "a" or "ab" or "abc" and the moment he types "abcd" or more characters, you can use map.keys starting with "abcd" using c# language support lamda expressions.
Hence, I suggest, create a map like:
Map<char, <Map<char, Map<char, Set<string>>>>> map;
So, if user enters "a", you look for map[a] and finds all children.

Indirect code execution/C#

Background
We currently have an excel-based system for the creation of specifications for a sound and lighting rental company.
Part of this is a column in the excel sheet called 'autospec', which is made up of Excel formulas for individual stock items ( e.g., you specify a loudspeaker, and then the formulas in the autospec column calculate the cables you need and add them onto the specification automatically.
sample formula
10m microphone cable might have a formula like the following:
=IF([loudspeakers]>0,[loudspeakers]*2,0)+([mixing desk]*4)
We're now moving over to a proper database with a C# front end.
Question
What I would like is to be able to store the autospec formulas for each stock item in a table, and when the user specs an item the front end, the program should find the relevant formula, execute it, and change the spec quantity as appropriate.
Bottom line: I need to execute code contained within a string.
Am I going about this the wrong way?
Is there a better way?

I asked a similar question once: How can I evaluate a C# expression dynamically?
You could probably use that to evaluate those expressions. This not really a safe thing to do, unless you can guarantee nobody will be adding junk (read: evil code) to your database.
If you can break down the formulas into "families", such that each entry in your formula column is a member of a small (5-10) set of formulas with just different parameters, you could try something like this:
[ItemTable]<-[ItemFormulaParameters(param1, param2, param3)]->[FormulaTable(name)]
And have a factory method for instantiating the formula objects by name. Each such formula object has a "calculate(param1, param2, param3)" property...

Either build you're own code interprenter or build a 'dynamic rule engine' that creates some binary representation of c# rules that can be executed by a 'rule engine' you'd have to write.