Repopulating Types When Reloading a Family

If you have purged types from a family in a project and then try to reload that family, you may have noticed that the purged types do not repopulate. The following is an approach you can take to bring those types back:

1. Open the family in question.
2. Inside the Family Editor, go to Create > Types.
3. In the Family Types dialog, under Family Types, click New...
4. Create a new Family Type - this will be a temporary type, so you can name it anything.
5. Click OK to exit the dialogs.
6. Reload this family back into the project.
7. Now all of the types should be reloaded into the project. You can then go to Manage > Purge Unused to delete the temporary type, or expand Families in the Project Browser to remove it.

You can also click here for a video that illustrates this process.

Comments

[Chad Lueptow]

Trying to load a family from a library location will not repopulate types (as mentioned above.) But we've noticed creating the temporary type is not required.

1. Open the family you want to load.
2. Click "Load into Project" and types are repopulated.

Why Revit looks at "Load into Project" different from "Load Family" seems a mystery.

[Kathryn Langan]

When you open the family from the Imperial Catalog and load it, you are loading a different version that what is stored inside the project, so it will repopulate them. The one thing about that is if you:

1. Open the family.
2. Load it into the project. The types should repopulate.
3. Purge them from the project.
4. Go back to the family and reload it again. The types won't repopulate.

The basic idea is that the family needs to somehow be different than the version that's already loaded so Revit recognizes the need to update it. There are many different ways it can be done, and I'm sure some users prefer some over others. And if you aren't reloading multiple times, loading it that first time like you said definitely works!