@GaryOrrMBI wrote:
Not all door families have a parameter called Door Swing (or whatever might be used by the end user).
Even if they did have the exact same parameter (a new built-in parameter) to control the door swings on each door... that would control the swing on that particular door everywhere in the model regardless of the view's phase.
Right. I'm not talking exclusively about door swings. I want to be able to access phasing, in one way or another, for all parameters. If people don't want phasing associated with any parameters, they don't have to.
So... You start a new project. Everything goes on the "New Construction" phase.
5 years later you remodel that project. "New Construction" becomes "Existing" and all Existing doors need to be modified to have a 45 degree swing, yet, in the "Existing" drawings they need to maintain their previous 90 degree swing...
Same thing for any and all future remodels. Furthermore, what if you are developing two or more phases of construction at the same time and need to print from multiple phase document sets? Not to mention that a Phase could be named anything so how does Autodesk plan ahead for the infinite possibilities?
Yea, this is why I don't think associating the parameters with phase created/demolished is the way to go. Works fine for simple projects, but can get messy. I'd go with something more like your solution below, similar to the graphic overrides in the phasing menu.
What we're actually talking about is needing to override the graphics (as opposed to the door instance itself) relative to the phase of the view and the "Phase Created" of the door instance to determine if it should show the swing at 45 or 90 (assuming that the user's desire is to show them as such since not everyone has the same standards) in that particular view (similar to phase Graphic Override settings).
I'm not sure that I want Autodesk hard-coding such a function into our Revit Environment.
Again, not advocating for this to solely be hard-coded to door swings. That's silly. I simply think it would be beneficial to access the phasing of families and be able to have parameters within the family interact with the phasing. Door swings would likely just be a super common example that a lot of firms would use.
But, back to the original question, even if they did allow us access to the instance specific Phase Created value... How would you write a formula within a door family to say:
"if this door instance's Phase Created does not equal this project's newest Phase..."
when neither of those values have any scope until an instance is placed in a project, at which time it can finally take on or be assigned Project specific values..
Couple things. One, the entire parameter system is extremely lackluster as is. It really needs an overhaul, in which case this could be more easily implemented. Two, if its purely based on whether the element is existing, demo, new, or temporary in a given phase, then those are four set-in-stone options that would exist within every single family. It SHOULD be simple to reference that (should, because again, Revit's parameter system is a mess, so it could very well be impossible within the current system). Within a new system, though, ideally formulas could, one way or another, be incorporated within families from within the project environment. Perhaps its an option within the families editor to have a parameters formula accessible from the project environment, so as to avoid the wild west breaking out within the project environment. In that case, perhaps the creation/demolition phases could be directly interacted with, rather than the relation between those phases and the views phase.
-G
