Scheduling elements by linked Rooms

[c.horner]

Hi there,

I'm  trying to figure out if there is an out-of-the-box method for scheduling elements by linked rooms, e.g.

Having all my FF&E in an isolated model, whilst all my rooms reside in a seperate architectural model, if I tried to create a schedule in either model with the opposing model linked within (or indeed, in a third model, with these two linked within), I cannot get it to recognise and schedule the FF&E elements by the room they are in.

I've seen many plugins and dynamo scripts (e.g. this one) that claim to do it, but they're all based off of creating new shared parameters that mimic the standard room parameters (e.g. room name or number)... it then becomes a one-off process that manually populates the information, copying from the standard parameters to the mimic ones. The issue with this is it has to be repeated each time something is changed; if I wanted to move a table from one room to the next for example, I would have to run the manual process all over again for the schedule to recognise the new room location, so there is no "live"/dynamic change to the schedule.

Any solutions to this?

[Alfredo_Medina]

It looks like you want to have a schedule of what furniture elements are in what room, and the rooms and furniture are in linked files. Then, in the host file, create a schedule of Rooms, check "include elements in links". Select what fields from Rooms you need to see, such as Name, Number. Then go to the Embedded Schedules tab, and activate Embedded Schedules. Then select the category Furniture. Then go to Embedded Schedule Properties, and select the fields from Furniture that you would like to see in the schedule. After doing this, if a table or desk moves from one room to another in the linked file, and the link is reloaded in the host, the schedule will update.

[c.horner]

Hi Alfredo,

Thanks for your input here, appreciated.

Using embedded schedules would be an ideal way of doing things, however, it does not work with linked elements as far as I can work out (yes, "include elements in links" is selected). Am I getting something wrong?

Sure, it is able to list elements that are hosted within rooms within the same model (and subsequently linked in), but my intention is to schedule elements that are only found in, say, model "A", whilst the rooms themselves are within model "B", which is then linked into A. 

[Alfredo_Medina]

Well, no, that's not going to work. You will need to create rooms in the same building where the elements that you want ro report room information are located. Or spaces.

[c.horner]

Thanks Alfredo, I thought as much. Seems like a function that should be within the software, but I guess Autodesk disagree...!

[BDMackey]

I have several interior clients, instead of using room they create spaces in their model. I will keep the same room boundaries as the linked file. The reason for this is the Space Naming Utility on the Analyze tab. Clicking this button will rename and number the spaces to match the linked rooms.   One downside is you can't get To Space or From Space with doors, but you can schedule elements with in a space similar to rooms.  Someone out there may have a Dynamo Script to do the same for Rooms as the Space name utility does for Spaces. Not sure.

[ToanDN]

Create spaces and they will match the linked rooms.