why is Autodesk typist?

[kgatzke]

The creators of Revit seem to have deliberately chosen to block us from filtering schedules by type, something which would come in handy in a lot of situations but is not available, and I would like to know why.

[loboarch]

I actually researched this a bit recently. I had to go way back to some original Revit Technology (pre Autodesk aquisition) developers to get an answer and even they were not totally sure.

Basically their answer was the family type was not technically a parameter so it is difficult to filter by. I am not sure of the technical problem with this but that was the reason. The family "type" is part of the family definition at a different level than the parameters of the family so a spacial case would need to be coded in order to filter by family type.

You can always add some other "type" parameter into the family to accomplish the same thing.

[rodrigo.bezerra]

Like Type Mark.

[kgatzke]

Is there a way to create a parameter for walls that will duplicate the type name or draw information from it?

[rodrigo.bezerra]

I'm not sure, but I guess not. If the type name was a parameter, like @loboarch said, it would be scheduleable anyway... Maybe creating a shared parameter (click here), but I insist that using type mark you succeed wth less effort.

Regards

[kgatzke]

That's kind of a chicken & egg problem if I wanted to filter schedules to better help me organise my type marks.  Not all my walls have type marks.  My office generally only tags interior walls and material tags exterior walls on elevations.

[loboarch]

I suspect this could be done via Dynamo. Extract the type name out and feed it back into some kind of container parameter.

I would agree that type mark would probably be the way to go without a bunch of monkey business. Even if you don't use the type mark for tagging as you suggest you use material tags for the exterior wall, you could still provide type marks for filtering in a schedule. Say all Exterior walls have a prefix type mark for some kind, you could filter for that.

[kgatzke]

The problem with Type Marks is they're not smart.  They depend on someone doing the right thing when filling in that parameter.  Type Name suffers from the same problem, but at least we're more careful about them because the names are more visible (appears in Properties, Project Browser, is already filtered for in View Templates, etc.) and we ID our materials in our Type Names.

I was trying to go after all the wall types that contained GB_CL or SOFFIT which are also not tagged because they duplicate full heighth walls but for a wallsweep at the base because Revit can't join a ceiling and wall cleanly.

[loboarch]

Correct they are not "smart", but they only need to be set once. Set the type marks on walls in your template or set them all on a wall library file, and they should be "correct". Little user interaction would need to happen. Of course when walls are duplicated and edited there is some interaction and the possibility for them to go sideways.

[David_W_Koch]

Here is a Dynamo graph, created in 0.9.2, that will take the name of each Basic Wall Type and Curtain Wall Type as a string and place that value in a type-based shared Project Parameter called NameFromType.  You have to add that project parameter before running the Dynamo graph; if you prefer to name that parameter differently, you can edit the Code Block that contains "NameFromType"; and replace the text between the double quotation marks with the name of your parameter.

Do this once in your template file to get your office-standard Wall Types set up, and, as Jeff mentions, keep it handy for when custom types are created.  The NameFromType (or whatever name you choose) parameter is then available for use in filtering a Wall Schedule.

Stacked Walls are filtered out of the list of Wall Types because Stacked Wall Types do not receive Project Parameters that are assigned to the Walls category (the component Wall Types do).  Including Stacked Walls in the list causes the Element.SetParameterByName node to show an error, which annoyed me, even though it still carried on and processed the remaining Wall Types.

[loboarch]

Very nice. I knew it was possible in Dynamo, I just don't have the skills to show exactly how it is done. I don't spend enough time solving "real" problems anymore. 🙂