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@kimberly.fuhrman this is my issue right here: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/obj-file-support/idi-p/9202039 13 votes (including my own AFTER it was already part of the roadmap), 2 comments (one is yours) and only a year and half old. It's on the roadmap. This issue however, 686 votes, 5+ years, and pages of comments and it's still "gathering support"????? This is what's wrong with the Idea page and why I don't feel like we are being listened to. It's doesn't seem to be that Autodesk is implementing ideas based on user input, you are just farming us for ideas, not priority. If you cared about priority than this would be on your roadmap, somewhere, ANYWHERE!
While you did respond quickly to my post, upon further reflection, I realize this isn't so worthy of praise. No doubt that Autodesk has automated search algorithms and the like to help find potentially inflammatory posts like mine, and route them to be addressed ASAP. It's standard practice for even small companies with a social media presence, so why not here as well. So I will lay the quick response aside as probably automated assistance, though appreciated none-the-less. That however is entirely unrelated to the feeling of uselessness I (and I'm pretty sure other users) feel. At least make it seem like you are implementing ideas based on our input and votes. That's all I'm asking.
Lastly, let me add another thing I noticed when looking back through the comments of this Idea; almost every person who has commented on this post has been a level 4 or above, most people in the 8-10 range. That should also tell Autodesk something VERY important, power users, longtime users, are asking for this. And if long time power users are asking for this, how many daily-users would love to have this but don't know how/want to make a request? If i was you @kimberly.fuhrman I would suggest looking for ideas that have not only the greatest number of votes, but the greatest average of user level as well. If you did that, I'm sure this issue would be much higher on the priority list than anything on the roadmap currently. As it is only 1 of the 12 items on the roadmap for coordination are even from the Ideas page. And that one idea was from 2018 and has 112 votes (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/c4r-ability-to-download-previous-version-without-rolling-...). Also 2 of 8 structural, and 0 of 13 systems roadmaps items, are even related to ideas. Architecture, and Everyone is much more Ideas based though.
Weird. My reply to a different thread posted here, too. Let's try again:
Poor @kimberly.fuhrman now has to bear the brunt of our frustration due Revit's years of neglect by Autodesk. She used to be "one of us", but now she has the job of cleaning up the forums and listening to us rant... with not much ability to change things.
That said, I've seen more ideas being implemented in the beta for the next version than I have in several previous versions combined (though we can't discuss specifics here). They're small changes that will make big impacts ("low hanging fruit" that we've been asking for for years). Hopefully they keep it up (because there are many more minor changes that need to be made, such as this idea). It's amazing how bad & crazy it needs to get before Autodesk wakes up and starts solving OUR problems (instead of THEIR problems - i.e. cash flow).
@RobertAGlover Essentially votes and status mean nothing - a highly-voted idea MIGHT get their attention, but if they think it's "too hard" they'll just ignore it. I recently had a 3.5-year-old ARCHIVED idea with 4 votes get "accepted" (though it still hasn't shown up in the roadmap).
Just came across this idea while trying to figure out how to work through a similar situation. I have a string parameter I want to check in another parameter's conditional statement. I assumed this functionality was already there until I couldn't get it to work. Here's to hoping they implement this.
@kimberly.fuhrman I've seen Autodesk implement all kinds of things that have complexity to them. Accepting a string datatype in formulas seems like something that would take maybe a couple of days for the development team to implement. You can already accept and process various forms of lengths and turn them into feet/inches, so why can't you read a string when I explicitly tell you in the formula editor that it's a string. The fact that 700 people have taken the time to find this idea and vote on it means that there are about 7,000 more who find out they can't do it, get frustrated, and move on. There's no math or other complex processing to be done on strings - just comparison (and I know I'm crazy for asking this, but strlen and strcat would be great too). Generally speaking, if I can make a formula in Excel, I want to make it in Revit too. You can't call Revit a database if you can't do simple operations on data.
Out of all the low-hanging fruit, this is probably the closest to eye-level. Of course, at this point four years later, the apple is sitting on the branch rotting.
Hi @aaron.jonesSAP83 , thanks for your feedback. While many things may seem like really low hanging fruit, it's really difficult (read: impossible) to tell from the outside. Even with many years of experience and having been a Revit developer, I cannot necessarily tell the difficulty of an project until I ask the developers who actually know that particular part of the code. In this case, I can tell you that if this were indeed as low hanging as you suggest, we wouldn't be having this conversation 🙂
As to @lionel.kai's comment about votes not mattering, I can state that that's not the case. We absolutely take votes into account. Votes are very helpful as a rough measure of value. I can also say that they are not the only measure of a project's importance. The other thing to consider is that importance is only one of the factors that plays into roadmap selection. Other factors (not exhaustive) include: effort, team availability (not all dev teams are created equal), alignment with strategic focus or future direction, adjacency to other work being done, discussions/research with customers, etc. Decisions to add something to the roadmap aren't formulaic and they are hardly ever straightforward. If they were my job would a lot easier. One thing I've said on a few occasions - if an idea has a lot of votes and it's not on the roadmap, you can draw a reasonable conclusion that it's not easy to address. That also doesn't mean that we wont pick it - it's just harder to fit it in.
@aaron.jonesSAP83 I feel you man. As far as i can tell from my experience as a developer the Revit codebase must simply be so loaded with technical debt that they just can't fix a lot of these basic issues without effectively starting again and coding it correctly. Off the top of my head things that bug me: constraints (ESPECIALLY in families) being horribly implemented. If you have used Inventor you know what you are missing out on. Not being able to lock a family parameter so it can't be edited once loaded.
Not being able to change formulas based on family type.
Not being able to set options for a parameter using a basic dropdown box.
Align tool not aligning my purlins correctly when they are on a sloped roof (always slightly offset based on zoom level).
Windows and doors on schedules looking like they are snapping but then placing pre-snap so nothing lines up.
For topology, the section cut material (and ONLY the cut material) being overwritten by an option in site settings. (WHY?????)
And of course not being able to use strings in formulas.
It's a really shame Autodesk can't/won't fix basic issues like these because then they would have a truly incredible product.
We've been waiting for this feature forever, it's a natural addition to Revit. We understand that it has not been done, but..... when can we expect it?
There's generally this question: Will I see this basic Revit feature in Revit before I die or retire?
This question is asked by both 20 year olds and 65 year olds. Will we get Revit formulas before 2100?
@SamuelAB you're funny! At this point its been over 5 years since the original post. With regular activity and commenting from higher tear users (like yourself). So I'm gonna guess it will take a fundamental rebuild of Revit to build in this functionality. As such I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. Autodesk appears too keen on their shinny "new" tools like BIM360/Build and getting more customers, not making their existing customers more productive and happy. They have a virtual monopoly on the BIM game and they know it.
If Navisworks, which is broken in ways that cause crashed on every system when doing something as simple as repeated scrolling in the sets window (an issue I discussed with their lead Navis developer years ago), and they haven't fixed that, adding significantly different coding function to the program is clearly just too difficult for them.
@sasha.crotty I know you'll reply to this too. I appreciate your role in keeping us disgruntled users in line. But come on! The lack of responsiveness from Autodesk on fixing issues is getting ridiculous. Its clear to every power user of Autodesk products that the company is more interested in broadening their customer base and income and less on improving the functionality and reliability for existing customers. But then again, when a company gets to the size of Autodesk its much more economical and practical to let some startup develop a better product then buy it and incorporate or squash it. That is after all how Autodesk got Revit and Navisworks after all.
I believe Sasha is also in the uncomfortable position of not having much budget or power from her higher ups 😕 They are the ones who are likely truly screwing us over by not allowing budget to fix Revit's fundamental workflow flaws
They want a shiny new feature every year to put on the website, without having the time to improve or fix the core product. It's easier for the marketing department to sell generative designs to business owners than to say "We fixed our schedules, legends and MEP phasing", which does not sound as exciting to shareholders
Now that they are focusing on "listening to customers" because of that big scary letter, it will be interesting to see how they do it since they've done a stellar job at not listening to us in the past, year over year.
so this topic is important since at least 2016... when will it come into revit?
@sasha.crottywe talked several times at bilt/rtc about this topic,the connector on/off trouble and connectors in nested families.
i understand, that it is not easy to shedule big development tasks, but the connector problems are known for nearly a decade now and the combine text thing is nearly as old.
i know not a single office working with revit, that would NOT need this feature of combining text and every mep office is desireing some addidinonal features of connectors. these are essentiel function that is still missing.
the only remedy is to use huge lookuptables with every combination in it, but it shouldn't be like this or should it?
btw. i fixed the problem of hiding and showing connectors some years ago for myself. can it really be so hard for autodesk to implement the feature if I found a working workaround? my families work flawless with connector on/off feature since 2017 !
some positive words at the end: i am glad, that the filter function was updated in that way wo spoke about at porto 🙂
We also see this as something that should be a basic and fundamental feature in a modern 3D modelling / BIM software. The possibility to combine text and number into a string in a formula has been possible to do in for example Excel for quite some time now. We also find it hard to understand why it cant be implemented in Revit? I agree that fixing these basic everyday used features in Revit would turn this great program into being an amazing one. Is there any development work being done at Autodesk on this issue currently?
PLEASE get this to happen. This is such a frustration to go from AutoCAD with intelligent text fields attached to parameters and object data for so much of my text notes, commit to Revit, only to realize text can't be intelligently compiled. The hoops you have to go through like Dynamo just to achieve what took 10 seconds in AutoCAD is disappointing and has me questioning whether Revit is a good tool to use.
Text annotations are such a fundamental part of design, yet Revit feels like the text tools were stolen out of a leftover Power Point box.
If this is very difficult to implement I would be willing to accept a freeze on all other update until this is implemented. There are so many things being added to Revit that affect a small amount of users. This change would affect everyone.
I for one, would love to see this change implemented. I read a lot of the comments on this idea and I really hope that Revit has time to pick this idea up!
@aaron.jonesSAP83@sasha.crotty I'd have to agree with Aaron on the implementation time likely only requiring a few days. I think there are many Revit users who are knowledgeable about software programming that can probably see that. Granted, after implementation it might need a week or two of testing and review before it's pushed out but as everyone in the comments has been saying, this is basic functionality.
Revit has the ability to parse the formulas as strings and return strings because writing if([condition],"text1","text2") will work. And it also has the ability to do arbitrary length function calls like and([condition1],[condition2],...].
So whatever parser takes the text entered in the formula column and decides what function to pass the parameters too just needs to be told to look for a concat([string1],[string2],...) signature, pass the parameters, and return the concatenated value as a string.
In fact, I really don't even think it would be too much harder to allow users to define custom methods in the macro manager that can be used in the formula column which would be HUGE. Clearly that would be a little bit of a lift just because of the potential for users to write code with errors which need to be handled safely but if that's the cool new feature they need to pitch to shareholders to get this basic functionality added, feel free to use it.
@mwagnerfrey6 , I appreciate your feedback, but having directly discussed this idea with the team who owns this specific code as well as having, in a past life, been a developer working in Revit, I stand by my statement.
I wrote the code for what happens if a user inputs two strings and an equals sign into the first parameter of an if function. Done. You may use the code I just wrote royalty-free.
All joking aside, the fact that we're still talking about this shows just how out-of-touch the Revit developers are with what Revit needs to do, which is generate drawings. The modelling aspect is a huge advancement in that it allows us to find issues with design much sooner than during construction, but we still have to document what we model. The information aspect of the database is just as important (if not more) than the 3D geometry aspect. We can't give a contractor a 3D model and say, "build this." We can only give them drawings. This involves text. I understand that coding is more complex than the C++ I wrote up there after ten years of not touching the language, but the fact that Autodesk doesn't care about providing simple functionality and only cares about the flashy new features is really telling of the kind of company it is. In my field, we like the big flashy projects that get our firm on the cover of a magazine, but we also do the boring small projects because it's just part of the industry. I wish Autodesk would understand they can't just do the fun stuff.
I will disagree with @aaron.jonesSAP83 that the model is very much a deliverable, at least on commercial and governmental projects, despite what the AIA has you believe. They are used and required by the GC as well as structural, MEP and Fire all RELY on the base design architectural model at least. And most of them start with a copy of the rest of the content as well. Having worked for a major A/E design firm then major subcontractor, and now a major GC over the past 15 years; it is, and has been a deliverable just like any document. HOWEVER, just as a detail supersedes a section, and a section supersedes and plan, the drawings supersede the model. 🙂
I've tried getting onto the AIA board that is currently reviewing the decade old BIM documents, but alas they don't let anyone but licensed architects. Given those two points (10 year review, and only architects) I've come to the conclusion that all AIA cares about is covering the architect's liability, and not what is the best, easiest and most useful to the project as a whole. Designers need to get with the 21st century. I don't know of a single subtractor that uses black and white drawings any more. Between color screens and the even cost and ease of color prints now, there is no reason to restrict yourself to black lines. Yet Other than renderings (that are mostly useless and dramatically bloat the file size) there is almost never color on design drawings. Just my opinion. Hate me if you want. :0)
But this is all off topic. We need text parameters BUILT in to formulas. PERIOD.
