Thursday, November 22, 2012

Can’t schedule wall constraint - part 2

Following on from last weeks post about not being able to schedule the wall constraint, I noted it can be done via the API; it can also be done via an odbc export or even in tool such as Ideate BIMLink. Now, I am no API guru, so I had call on my good friend & fellow CASE Inc colleague, Don Rudder to help me out. Fortunately, I come up the problems & shoot them over to him, for him to weave his magic! So this is a sneak peak at a tool which will be released, hopefully, in December as part of CASE-apps. The tool in essence allows you to get access to any parameter from any category & pass it to a target parameter.Steps are:-

  • Select a category
  • All parameters can be used as the source for data
  • Only Non Read-Only Text parameters can serve as the target (where the data from the source will be sent)
  • Select a data format option (human readable would be 2’-6” as opposed to 30.0)
  • Click OK

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When the tool is run, if it encounters an group, it will throw up the following warning message as it tries to ungroup the elements on the fly & write the data. If you have lot of groups, this could take some time to go through clicking the “ok” button, however it will be quicker than manually inputting the data.

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A resulting dialog shows a count of errors will then be displayed.

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Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Differences between editing - LT v Full Revit

Discovered this today whilst working with Revit LT. If you model a floor, roof, wall or slab in Revit LT, once the component is modelled, if you just double click the element you automatically go into edit sketch mode; which is different compared with full Revit where you required to select the edit boundary button.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Can’t schedule wall level constraint

One really annoying thing you can’t do in Revit is the ability to schedule a wall & know its wall constraint. What is more frustrating is that the wall constraint is exposed in the API, so tools like Ideate BIM link will allow you to pick up the constrain & schedule this.

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Manually, you can get around this by assigning a family parameter within the fields section of a wall schedule. Give it a name, something like “level location”. You will need to manually enter text by switching to a each plan view & select all instances of the wall type, or using the filter function to select all the walls across each view. It should not be too time consuming, but could be problematic with groups, but it does require you to follow the process carefully.

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However,  with my good friend & colleague Don is cooking something up which should make this whole process a lot easier. When its ready we will let you know.