When Adding a Keynote Tag the User Borrows a Sheet Workset

You may on occasion notice a user becoming the borrower of a specific sheet workset in the project.  This user may never have opened or explicitly borrowed that particular sheet.  To confirm this navigate to Workset > Views > with the specific workset beginning with View “Sheet…

One common scenario where this will occur is as follows:

1. There is a sheet in the project A101.
2. Several project views have been placed on this sheet.
3. UserA is in one of the views that appear on sheet A101.  They have not opened or edited sheet A101 directly.
4. In this view UserA adds a keynote.
5. Because this view appears on sheet A101, Revit needs to borrow the view workset for sheet A101 to update keynote data.  There could also be a keynote legend on this sheet for example.

The next time UserA synchronizes with central, borrowed elements would be checked for relinquishment and the user would no longer be the borrower of the sheet workset.

However during the period when UserA is the borrower of sheet workset A101 [before they sync] UserB could potentially run into this message:

Because UserA initially borrowed the sheet workset by adding a keynote in one of the views, UserB cannot add a keynote in another view which appears on the same sheet.  UserA would have to synchronize with central to relinquish \ save the keynote changes first.

UserB would also be unable to add another project view to sheet A101 during this same period; if they tried they would receive the same message since UserA is borrowing the sheet.

A user may not understand why they are listed as the sheet borrower given they never opened or modified the sheet directly.  All users in the project should understand that when they place a keynote in a view, all sheet worksets will be borrowed which that keynote appears in.

In addition to keynotes, revisions added in views work in exactly the same manner.

A standard synchronize with central relinquishing the borrowed elements will clear the sheets that were borrowed; then the other user can simply reload latest \ or synchronize with central as needed.

Note that this behavior has been improved for Revit 2014.

Comments

[Laura Coomber]

Do you have any idea why we would be seeing this same behavior even though the user holding on to the sheet(s) has not even been in the model?

[Ryan Duell]

Do you know if this user has ever been in the model? If they did at some point become the sheet borrower, and then since closed out but did not relinquish the sheet view workset, they would hold onto it indefinitely.

Otherwise, if this was not the case, does this message occur when a user attempts to open the model or during normal activity in the model?

[Rahul Shah]

I have had similar issues as Laura. The user was not even part of the project team but when we try to create new workset, for example, it says so and so user owns something and rejects creating new workset until we ask that user to open model and STC or we change username and open ourselves and STC. Very bizzare!

[Laura Coomber]

This is a reoccurring issue that we are having with several sheets in several models. Daily there is a user holding on to the sheet(s) that has not been in the model. It may be the same user for several days, although it is not always the same user. Our users holding on to the sheets are not in the model, but working in a linked model. We haven’t had any problems with a user holding on to the sheet that is outside of the project. Daily they either get in and relinquish or someone changes their user name to relinquish them.

The error message can occur when a user is opening the model, or during a sych with central. We have seen both.

[Laura Coomber]

We were able to get rid of our errors by rehosting all keynotes, dimensions, etc. to something live in our model on the problem sheets. No annotations hosted by a linked model. We rehosted all of the annotations in all of the views on any sheet that was giving us the error.