gbXML export - Control Units

[Evan.S.Hall]

Is there anyway to control the units when exporting a gbXML file from Revit? I'm Exporting from Revit 2018 and then importing into to Trace 700, and I would like to have some control of what units are used for the Specified Power Load (In Trace, this is the "Misc Loads" field). Specifically, I would like to see the Specified Power Load in terms of BTU Per Hour, but it is always exported in Watts Per Square Feet. Here is what I tried so far:

1) I asked Google, but couldn't find anything on the topic of gbXML units.

2) Change the project units in Revit so that the Power Load defaults to Btu/h when I'm in the Power Load dialogue. However, this had no effect on the gbXML export.

3) After the export, I manually edited the XML file to see if I could at least get the results I wanted in Trace 700. This gave me hope that the principle is possible, but I still didn't get the desired results. See notes on screenshot below.

[christian.riley]

@Evan.S.Hall -

I understand you are looking to modify the gbXML data for specific load reporting. It is my understanding that this is fairly hard-coded, and that the data that you had modified links back to other data within that xml. This explains the unexpected results. 

I will do some research and see what can be modified.

[christian.riley]

@Evan.S.Hall

After looking into this some more, the gbxml is definitely not intended to be edited. It will export the data that is linked within the program. If we cannot make the edits to the information within the original Revit model we will not be able to change it within the gbXML file. Is it possible to edit Trace 700 to replicate these results?

[Evan.S.Hall]

@christian.riley

Thanks for looking into this. The only way to change the "Specified Power Load" aka "Misc Load" units in Trace after the gbXML import is through a manual process, room by room (which would defeat the purpose of importing the specified power load data via gbXML). I spoke with several technical support representatives from Trace 700 and they verified this is the case.

The only reason I experimented with editing the XML file directly was to see if Trace could even accept different units. I concluded that it could, but I clearly didn't understand the syntax it requires (see image from above). This led me to ask the question on here to see if we had any control of the exported units from Revit.  If we can't control the units that are exported from Revit via gbXML, I'll just have to settle with what we can do now.