Issues with Gridlines on documentation drawings in Revit

[lejla.s]

Hi guys, 

I'm a technical specialist working closely with customers and would appreciate to hear your opinion about some issues we currently have with gridlines in Revit. Please note I'm an architect myself and not a developer, however I've been working with Revit since a long time and have tried everything that GUI offers in order to solve these problems - without success. I really count on some API-magic here! 🙂 

When working on complex projects in Revit, we ran into following problems concerning gridlines: 

Problem 1: 

When working with non-orthogonal gridlines, e.g. radial ones like in our example, it is very difficult to dimension the grid intersections. You need to TAB three times in order to snap to the intersection each time, and even then it is very confusing because Revit is not highlighting the intersection point (you can just read it on the status line).

Does anyone have an idea for a workaround / API hack how to automatize the dimensioning? The project in this case is really huge and we are talking about hundreds of such dimension lines which need to be placed manually, which is very tedious.

Problem 2: 

When creating documentation drawings, the view crop / annotation crop is cutting everything off apart from grids - these have a certain offset which cannot be influenced through any settings accessible in the GUI. For users coming from AutoCAD, this is a very weird behavior and it also leads to a very high offset on drawings which non-orthogonal grids. 

Does anyone have an idea how to influence this behavior and force the gridlines to be cropped as well or at least set the offset? 

I created a small project file with only 2 views showing these two problems in detail. I would be very grateful if anyone has an idea how to approach one of the problems. 

Wish you all a lovely weekend and thanks in advance for any ideas! 

Lejla

[Anonymous]

For issue 2, you should be able to use the
DatumPlane.SetCurveInView Method to adjust the curve to what you'd like.

For Issue 1, It seems conceptually possible to find the intersections of these gridlines (though it's worth noting that they are datum planes, not simple lines) The challenge seems to be in getting a reference to the intersection point. I don't have a quick answer, perhaps someone who has dealt with finding references to intersections could help as Dimensions need references to create through the API)

[Anonymous]

One other way you can control the extents of the grids is to use a scope box and assign the grids to that scope box.

[Aaron.Lu]

Dear Lejla,
unfortunately, in order to do exactly what you want with API, the quick answers should be: impossible.

there are only some "close" workaround, just like ken said. e.g.

for issue 1, there is no way to create dimension on the intersection of curves with API, an awkward workaround maybe: create some very small curves at the intersection points and then create dimensions on those small curves via API

for issue 2, would you like to try:
* drag the grid end of Grid1,2,3 to be inside crop boundary, is what you want? if yes, then the API method DatumPlane.SetCurveInView should be the workaround. if no, then you could try scope box mentioned by ken.