Currently, the Room tag family can see, and tag, a room that is in a linked model, and a Space family can see rooms in linked models. But other families cannot. Since the rooms are typically in the architects model, the other disciplines involved in the project cannot directly leverage the room info. I work in low voltage, so I frequently need to schedule things like
- What room is this data connection in?
- What room is this display in?
I imagine that lighting designers, furniture designers, etc, have similar challenges.
The work around right now is to make spaces, and match the space names/numbers to the underlying room names/numbers. But that adds a maintenance issue - space naming and numbering is updated by the architect as the design evolves, and so we are constantly needing to update the spaces to match.
Spaces offer the ability to create a space-like object that has additional parameters that you control, which is great. But if all you need is for an object in your model to know what room its in, when the room is in another model, they require too much maintenance.
Allowing all of the families to recognize the rooms in the linked model would streamline things for me, and I think for many others.