Material Tags Show Question Marks & Empty TagText

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I tried to create some material tags with IndependentTag.Create() on certain views but encountered some problems:

1. If the view is not activated in the document, the material tags can still be created on that view but the texts are all question marks.(If the view is activated, even if it's not the current active view, the result is still right).

2. With those material tags with question marks, you can nudge the tags to reveal the right text but you cannot do that with codes.

3. Even if the right text is revealed, the tag.TagText is still empty with either Revit LookUp or code debugging which is quite wired. 

The following pic shows some original material tags with question marks created by codes, some correct ones by nudging them manually, and the empty TagText by Revit LookUp.

Does anyone have any idea on the above problems? Thanks a lot.

[jeremytammik]

This issue has been discussed repeatedly here in the past, but not really explained in depth:

• https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/how-get-correct-text-of-independent-tag/m-p/9161393
• https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/how-to-check-if-the-text-of-an-independenttag-is-ques...
• https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/material-tags-show-question-marks-amp-empty-tagtext/m...
• https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/find-unhosted-tags/m-p/9049794

Apparently, there can be several different causes and it is important to understand from an end use point of view first.

I searched the Internet for 'revit material tag question mark':

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=revit+material+tag+question+mark

That returns a number of useful explanations:

This knowledgebase article explains some reasons and how to handle them:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles...

Here is a real-world discussion that explains various additional aspects and problems that may arise:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-architecture-forum/material-tags-randomly-change-to-question-ma...

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks a lot for your reply. I actually went through all posts or articles I could find related to this issue but none of them can totally solve this problem. I have already found a workaround to partially avoid this issue but it only works when the view is activated.(posted under https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/material-tag-created-by-api-does-not-show-material-da...

What I am trying to do is creating those tags in background only with codes so there's no user interface and nor an UIApplication. I would appreciate it if you could suggest some other solution on this issue. Thanks.

Best,

Leo 

[jeremytammik]

New workarounds suggested in the thread on Material Tag created by API does not show material data:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api-forum/material-tag-created-by-api-does-not-show-material-da...

Can you try them out please, and let us know whether they work for you?

Thank you!

[pratheeshjaison]

We found a solution and it's working. hope this can work for you too. 

I was working on the Electrical Revit model in Revit 2021.1.3. we provided all electrical equipment tags value as a shared parameter and those were working well. and suddenly one day, all tags changed to "?".  but the parameter value still exists there. When we tried to use the same tag one more time, it is perfectly coming normal. but retagging all is a hell of rework. so I researched some alternate methods.

Then I found that the below step is perfectly working and all the tags back to normal as before once this is done.

Solution

Go to manage tab - open Project Parameter - Select the Parameter (the parameter that becomes "?" on your model)

Click on "Modify" - Select "Export" - click ok

then Select the "?" family - Edit Family - inside the family edit, go to Manage tab - click on Shared parameter - 

here you can find the parameter you exported earlier under the "Exported Parameters" Group.

select the parameter you want - click ok.

Then -go to Edit Label - Click on "Add Parameter - "Select" - select the Parameter from the shared Parameter - click ok

(*Some cases maybe you need to remove the existing Parameter added with Label and add again)

once you edit the label as you required (using the shared parameter), Load this to the project. 

This will make all your "?" tags Back to normal.

Hope this can solve the issue