The Revit Clinic

Wish upon a Revit

Our friends over with the Autodesk Developer Network have recently launched the Revit API wishlist survey.  This is a great chance to provide feedback on the future of the Revit API and let your voice be heard.

The survey is open till June 15th 2013.  Head on over the the AEC DevBlog for more info here.  

Being content with content…Configuring Revit Content Searching with Vault

This post is from guest contributor, Adam Peter.  As a Customer Success Engineer with Autodesk Adam provides data management expertise to Architectural, Engineering and Construction companies around the world.

You may perhaps be aware that Vault has an add-in with Revit and that new in 2014 is a feature that allows you to search for family files based on the parameters within that file.

Before you can take full advantage of the feature there is a little legwork that needs to be done first.

Step 1:  Download and install the Revit Plug-in for Vault Professional 2014.  This can be downloaded HERE.  Be mindful that this is installed on the Vault server and not the client.

Step 2:  Log into the ADMS console and right click on the vault of your choice.  From here select the “Revit Indexing Service” from the menu.

Step 3:  Within the ensuing dialog box select the “Yes, enable the Revit Indexing Service” button.

Step 4:  Wait for the indexing to take place.  It does take some time for the initial index to process depending on the amount of family files you’ve added to the Vault.  The task of indexing also works on a 20 minute heartbeat so when you add new content it may also take a few minutes to show up in the search dialog.

With the new feature installed and configured you can have peace of mind knowing that you can find any file, searching on all the parameters within!

Revisions & Keynotes & Worksets & Revit 2014

I want to update and elaborate on our previous post:

When Adding a Keynote Tag the User Borrows a Sheet Workset

For Revit 2013 or earlier there are 2 common scenarios where sheet view worksets can be borrowed working with keynotes or revisions.  The first was mentioned in the original post:

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.  UserA has 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.
6. If UserB attempts to add a keynote to one of these views before UserA syncs with central & relinquishes they would receive the expected “Can’t edit the element until UserA…” message.

The second is applicable only for Revit 2012 \ 2013, where tagging linked model geometry with keynotes is possible:

1. There is a host model containing a Revit link.
2. Keynotes are added (in the host) attached to link geometry.
3. At some point the link geometry changes (such as deleting a wall) causing the keynote tag to become orphaned.
4. When a keynote tag is orphaned, it is removed from keynote legends when filtering by sheet.
5. The next user to create a new local file, or reload the link will load those changes (which orphans the keynote tag).  This in turn borrows every sheet view workset that tag previously appeared in.

For Revit 2013 or earlier the original post provides some additional information around this behavior.

For Revit 2014 keynote and revision functionality has been improved.  Sheet view worksets are no longer borrowed during the same process, which should give larger project teams additional flexibility (especially during documentation-heavy project phases).

Corruption in Revit LT 2014 project after upgrading from 2013.

The following is another great guest post from Product Support Specialist Lance Coffey.

We are starting to see a number of users reporting "Data in file is corrupt" error messages after upgrading a project to Revit LT 2014.

After some investigation, we have found that this can happen when saving an upgraded file on top of a previous version. The reason is that some of the prior version elements remain unchanged in the file, which then puts the project in a state which cannot be used by Revit LT, and when reopening the project, Revit LT will report data in the file is corrupt.

If this happens, recover a backup copy of the project before it was upgraded.

To avoid the issue, when upgrading a project in Revit LT 2014, use Save As to save to a new filename.

Once upgraded and saved to a new name, you can save the 2014 project normally.

Our developers are aware of this, and are currently working to address the issue.

Model Elements on View Worksets

Revit has 4 main categories for worksets:

User-Created
Families
Project Standards
Views

The only category directly accessible to users (to change the workset assignment) is User-Created.

In Revit 2013 or earlier you may occasionally notice a model element (such as a wall, door, family, etc.) on a View workset.  View worksets are not user selectable and are instead managed by Revit internally.  So how did this happen?  This could occur under the following scenario: 

1. The user selects and enters an edit mode for an element on a view workset.  Some examples include plan regions, detail groups, or filled regions
2. Instead of using ‘Finish Edit Mode’ or ‘Cancel Edit Mode’ the user instead clicks Undo to exit edit mode
3. Now back in the project, the user starts adding model elements, such as walls.  The walls are placed on the current View workset instead of the active User-Created workset (until the user opens the workset dialog or changes the active workset):

This behavior was improved in Revit 2014.  Using Undo to exit edit mode will correctly reset the active workset.

For earlier releases you can easily isolate elements that may be on an incorrect View workset and assign them to a specific User-Created workset.

First to isolate model elements on view worksets:

1. Create a new 3D View and turn on all categories in Visibility / Graphic Overrides
2. Set the view ‘Discipline’ to ‘Coordination’
3. In Visibility/Graphic Overrides > 'Worksets' tab, set every workset ‘Visibility Setting’ to ‘Hide’ > OK to close the dialog
4. Any element that is visible should be on view workset.  This makes it easy to identify inconsistencies in workset assignment

To move the elements to the desired User-Created workset:

1. Set the Active Workset to the workset you wish the model element onto
2. Cut to Clipboard
3. Paste Aligned to Same Place.  The model element should now be on the active workset.  If it worked correctly you should not see the element again until you adjust the Visibility / Graphic Overrides > Worksets tab, and set ‘Visibility Setting’ back to not use ‘Hide’