Improved hosting of face based elements on walls

[arjanpol]

A part of our companies activities consists of engineering precast concrete elements (balconies, columns, walls, etc.) for production companies.

Our workflow for engineering a precast wall in short: create a wall, place face based elements (such as fixing or transporting anchors, junction boxes, etc), create wall assembly, create shop drawings from assembly.

Sometimes the same wall element needs to occur in multiple places in the project. We therefore copy the assembly to the designasted location and if necessary rotate it to the right oriëntation. However when rotating a wall assembly we encounter a problem: the face based elements on the vertical and horizontal sides of the walls are not properly constraint to the wall, they keep their original oriëntation. This is shown in the screenshot below.

The cause for this issue is that face based elements can only be placed on the shape handle of the wall. This is also the only workplane you can select, you can't cycle through workplanes by using the TAB-button.

This wall behaviour changes when you edit the profile of the wall. When only 1 boundary line is edited, suddenly you have the option of cycling through the shape handle and the wall reference as a workplane.

When assigning the wall reference as a workplane to the face based element the problem is solved and the element is properly constrained to the wall.

Therefore I would like to have the possibility  to cycle through shape handle and wall reference as a workplane to be a basic wall property/functionality, without having to edit its profile first.

P.S. this issue has already been discussed with Autodesk customer support. They have confirmed the issue and registered it as a wish for product enhancement. However they requested for me to post this idea to gather support from the community.

[NateBrush]

This is one of many reasons we don't use hosted families. We use level hosted families exclusively because there are too many unknown and unpredictable things that happen with hosted families for us to be confident we are not losing data.