COPY MONITOR AND LINK FILES

[mwtiner]

when linking files from 4 or 5 differant companies and they have all copied / monitored the same objects from each other it would be nice to have a feature to link without copy monitored objects. alternative a way to filter off objects in link files that have been copied / monitored. this is particuarly needed when there are a lot of them, example case would be 100 VAV units in mechanical, long time to hide each one.

[RobDraw]

That sounds rather complicated. How do you identify what elements are being copied? 

I occasionally run into this and usually solve it in V/G Overrides by hiding the categories. Depending on the parties involved, strategic use of view templates can eliminate a lot of that kind of stuff.

[mwtiner]

That is my problem.
I link in MECHANICAL equipment from 4 files and only one of them is the true version of the object, the one mechanical place in their model.
I need a way to exclude the copies structural, plumbing and architectural copied, particularly when they are not up to date copies.

[RobDraw]

Are you aware that you have that control of category V/Gs of links?

Also, it doesn't make sense that those elements were copy/monitored the way you describe. It would make sense if everyone linked everyone else's models.

[mwtiner]

YES
If you turn off the mechanical equipment category in the plumbing link you loose both the plumbing mechanical equipment and the copy monitored mechanical equipment that they copied from mechanical.

[RobDraw]

I don't think you're going to be able to filter out copied elements. The various trades need to be more cognizant of what they are responsible for, only model just that, and find other ways of showing elements that are the responsibility of others.

I'm afraid that you need to come up with a workaround or some manual solution. 

[iainsavage]

---

@mwtiner wrote:
YES
If you turn off the mechanical equipment category in the plumbing link you loose both the plumbing mechanical equipment and the copy monitored mechanical equipment that they copied from mechanical.

---

In VG go to the Revit links tab.

Highlight the plumbing link, change from “host view" to "custom".

Then click on "Custom" to enter the custom settings for the link.

Go to the model tab for the link, change that to custom too.

Hide the mechanical equipment in that tab.

That will hide mechanical equipment in the plumbing link without affecting visibility of equipment in your host model or other links.

[edit: typos corrected]

[mwtiner]

Not following you.
If I turn off mechanical equipment in plumbing file link it turns off both roof top units, vav units and more importantly all the pumps and water heaters I need from the plumbing link.
The problem is they are the same category MECHANICAL, and they are in a file at a company I have no authority over.

[iainsavage]

I thought you were saying that you didn’t want to see mechanical equipment that was contained in the plumbing link.

So are you wanting to see some mechanical equipment but not others? If so you need to devise filters based on some property of the families e.g. family name etc.

Or am I missing the whole point of the post?

[mwtiner]

Yes I don't want to see copied mechanical objects in the plumbing file but I do want to see the mechanical objects designed by the plumbing designer(pumps,water heaters...)
Basically I do not want to see any objects from a link that were copy monitored from another file, I want to get those from the person/model that is responsible for them.

[iainsavage]

So all of those objects are identical in every way? Every parameter, workset etc identical and there’s no way to distinguish them to control their visibility separately?

Tough one. Don’t know how to do that. Maybe someone smart could do it with Dynamo somehow to identify which link contains the elements but that would be beyond my skills.

[mwtiner]

Agree, this is why I posted a request.
Revit know the objects are copy/monitors but there is nothing I can grab to filter or identify them.
I would think it would be easy for them to add something to unload all copy/monitored objects in a link file.
These are not really part of that link anyway, they may have forgotten them and hidden them in their file or who know what coordination errors it could cause.

[iainsavage]

This page might point you in the right direction with Dynamo, then you could filter lists and then maybe hide in view? I am however speculating here.

@L.Maas or @RLY_15 maybe could advise on using Dynamo for this.

[RLY_15]

So (for some reason), consultants are copy-monitoring elements that they should not be directly modifying based on their discipline, and now all of that needs to get hidden away? Ouch.

https://forum.dynamobim.com/t/copy-monitor-watched-elements/28660

This is a brief discussion that suggests that the copy-monitor association that we can very obviously see in the main Revit client isn't exposed to tap into with a Dynamo workflow. Unfortunate. So that leaves something like location-based association.

What this means is that you'd collect all of the elements of interest from the source linked file (VAVs from the Mechanical linked file, in this instance), collect all of the elements of interest from the other linked files, use GetLocation to simplify the comparison to points instead of solid geometry, then use DistanceTo, looking for zero or minimal distance groupings. This is probably going to be quite lag-intensive due to the number of comparisons, I honestly wouldn't recommend this route (what do you do when the model updates with more of these in the future?) In the case of 100 VAV boxes that's 100x100x(number of linked models) comparisons. You would also wind up missing any copy/monitored elements that have substantially moved between links.

Most quick-fix solutions will require consultant participation. Off-the-cuff, having consultants assign copy/monitored elements to a specific Workset would allow for view filtering.