Famliy Type Catalog - Read Only

[JonWLakewood]

Will making a family type catalog .txt file read only cause a sharing violation?  We are trying to button down our central family library, the entire path for which has been made read only, and now we're getting errors.

Follow-up question, why in world would Revit need write access in order to pull types from a catalog file?  This seems like simple oversight that essentially prevents central repositories from protecting their contents when using type catalogs.  The catalogs in question haven't been modified in years, last being updated due to the '21 header format change.

[iainsavage]

I placed a file in a temporary folder and made the folder and files read only.

Still loaded into a sample project.

So maybe that's not what is causing it.

I'm working stand-alone on my laptop though, not on a network, don't know if that makes any difference.

[JonWLakewood]

That was with, or without the use of a type catalog? Standard families without associated type catalogs load without issue; this only affects those employing type catalogs.

[iainsavage]

Family with type catalogue.

Loaded fine.

Is it just one family with type catalogue or all families with type catalogues which you are having trouble with?

[JonWLakewood]

All (2) of the families that have such a catalog. Neither have been edited since 2017 & 2021, respectively, and were working just fine until we locked down the library. We now are seeing the sharing violation for all known users, on all Revit versions in use.

[iainsavage]

I did some searching and couldn't find any previous reference to this issue.

There are some other posts which mention sharing violations but not in relation to loading families.

This article might be relevant but I'm not sure.

I would suggest:-

1. reset the folder to remove the read-only flag and see if that solves the problem
2. raise a support request with Autodesk.

Another point though - if the files haven't been edited since 2017 and 2021 (presumably due to the units change), then do you actually need to lock them to prevent alteration? Doesn't sound as though you have a problem with users doing unauthorised editing?

[JonWLakewood]

One would hope that's the case, but we have needed to restore a significant number of families from archives due to inadvertent and intentional, unauthorized editing. This is exacerbated by the lack of backwards compatibility, since the Revit version we use is dictated by our clients. Currently have projects in all versions 2019-2024. Suggestion #1 is possible, but extraordinarily slow (8.27GB in the libraries). A parallel development structure of the content works without issue.