Revit's current undesired behavior:
While in the project environment, tab selecting a nested shared family allows you to see nested family's instance parameters, but they are all greyed out and cannot be changed.
Desired behavior:
Allow us to tab-select the nested shared family instances in the project environment and change the instance parameters that are not linked to the parent family parameters.
For example, I have two families:
- Cabinet Door
- Cabinet Drawer
Then I have a shared families:
- Shaker Panel
- Flat Panel
- Raised Panel
- etc.
The panel families are nested inside the door and drawer families, and since they are shared, I can create new panel types and swap them out and use them at will with the door and drawer families in the project environment (without having to open up the door and drawer families and add panel types there).
This works great, EXCEPT that sometimes the shared nested panel families have unique parameters that other panel families don't have/need and I want those parameters be instance parameters instead of type parameters (so our users don't have to create new family types). But if I assign those as instance parameters, then I cannot modify them in the project environment without opening the parent cabinet and door families, creating new parameters and linking them, and making sure all my other panel type families are updated with the new parameters so the links don't break.
Being able to tab-select nested shared families and editing their instance parameters would give us a lot more flexibility over shared family types and make managing our BIM library a lot easier. They are all instances anyway.