Family Formula Concatenation

[henry_eduvie4GZRT]

Hi All,

I have created a new Builders Work Hole (BWH) family and i intend to concatenate the defined shared parameter formula for "6005 _ BWH _ Reference" so that the resultant value combines values for originator, level and mark each seperated by a hyphen i.e A - B - C. I have achieved this in the schedule by using combined parameters but i am not sure if i can achive this with a formula. Is it possible?

Please refer to the image illustrated below 👇for expalanation

I look forward to hearing from you all

Thank you

Regards

[mhiserZFHXS]

You can do this in a schedule, as you've figured out, but you cannot do it in a family via parameters. One of the many improvements for families/parameters that have been asked for for years. 

The good news is that this generally isn't the end of the world, as you can create this effect in schedules and tags, where it would ultimately show. 

[henry_eduvie4GZRT]

Oh! is that so?  Are you suggesting i manually copy the combined parameters from the schedule into the shared parameter value in the family? What if i have thousands of families in my project, is there a way i can effienctly implement this task? 

[mhiserZFHXS]

No, that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying it probably isn't critical to be able to have the combined parameters in the family itself, though it would be nice if we could. But you can combine them in schedules, as you've noticed, and you can combine them within tags. Those are likely the two places the combination would show. 

Is there somewhere else this combined value would be expressed? 

[agueda_contreras_garcia]

In Revit, you cannot combine text parameters with a formula because the formula engine only supports numeric operations and conditional logic for text. There’s no built-in concatenation function for text, so combining text fields requires manual entry or automation via Dynamo or a plugin.

[TripleM-Dev.net]

As the comments say, you can't combine text parameters.

What will be the intended purposeor use of this combined value? 

1. Display in schedule (for sheet or export as data) = Combined Fields possible

2. Tag the elements = In tags fields can also be combined

3. Just having this in the family when selecting (some info for user when working on model) = can be done with Dynamo,  API etc, but the danger is that the value can become out-of-sync with the other values. The reference should be read-only for this.

4. Export to IFC, the reference can be fixed value formula (see IFC export info) and during export pulls the values of the parameters and exports them as one value (I use this in quite some families)

All this is based that the 3 "input" parameters can have a variable values (not predefined)

- Michel

[mari.shimode]

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