Purge (nested) Families

[Simon_Weel]

If Purge is used in a project file, all unused Familes and types etc. are purged. Not all unused stuff is purged, but that's another wish. Unused items in Families are not purged. To purge Families, you have to open the Family and perform Purge. But if the Family contains nested Families, they're not purged. You havbe to open the nested Family and purge it. And if that Family has nested Families.... you get the idea.

If Families are shared, then purging is a little easier - purge one shared Family and the rest is done also. But not all Families can be shared.

So what's needed is for Purge to purge all familes and nested families as well.

Simon

[Anonymous]

Could some user input be added to the purge function, I have had the scenario where a project has been purged and I have later needed to use another type of a particular family forcing a re-load, haven't checked 2017 but previously if the family was identical to the one in the project you could not do a re-load forcing you to re-save the family purely to enable you to load it 

What would be nice would be a check box to leave types in families that are in use or as suggested above an option to blitz the lot!

[RakMas]

totally agree Simon,

please vote for my idea as well since it might be helpful as well to you

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/binding-a-family-inside-another-family/idi-p/7428191

Thank You,

Rakan

[pieterdewaal]

TL;DR: Add a purge feature to open families loaded and purge them, removing bloat from those elements to significantly reduce project size.

We've received models that are bloated and severely affect performance. Unfortunately, we cannot insist that all consultants/interior architects purge each family within their projects nor install pay-for subscription software to do so.

We've received individual models that are over 3gb in size, after purging, with families loaded that are over 200mb in size per family. Upon further inspection, the family has multiple families/groups etc. loaded within which cannot be purged directly from the project. After spending some time determining which families are the main culprits and individually purging them, we successfully reduced the revit link size to about 100mb. The funny thing is that the link was for a small single floor tenant of only around 800m2. Most of the size came from bloated furniture.

Having a purge function that not only purges unused families/groups from the project but also opens each loaded family and purges the inside i.e. nested purging which severely improve performance and workflow. Obviously, this will affect purge time if enabled so it must be a toggleable option.

Having 10+ links in a project and trying to manually clean these is simply unfeasible. Ideally, this would also form part of the e-transmit functionality so that the BIM manager can request that the team enable this before issuing for optimised performance.

[Simon_Weel]

Idea already posted...

[pieterdewaal]

@Simon_Weel And it's an excellent one. I noticed that it was back in 2016 and felt necessary to post again.

[ks2_wmb]

This is especially problematic for materials in project families.  If a family in a project contains a material, you can't purge the material, even if nothing in the family has the material assigned.

[Ric_Weber]

@kimberly_fuhrman-jones, I think this is the same idea as https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/purge-nested-families/idi-p/6332847  I think they should be merged.  Your thoughts?