OOTB Receptacle dimensioning weirdness

[Anonymous]

Using Revit 2018 electrical Duplex OOTB family and trying to align it centered on a section of wall. When I dimension the duplex, it highlights and allows me to pick the centerline of the receptacle symbol as expected, but the final dimension (pic 1 below) is aligned off-center. 

I think it's trying to align to the center of the entire annotation object... including the nested label in the family (pic 2 below). 

I would like it to align the dimension correctly, so I can be assured the symbol will print centered on the floor plan sheet. Any suggestions? I haven't seen any commentary about this on a quick search of the forums, but this is an OOTB issue as far as I can tell. 

[RobDraw]

I'm getting the same offset with a modified version of the family. I don't think it is aligning to the annotation symbol but rather the edge of the box.

I don't have time to trouble shoot it but this might help.

[Anonymous]

I'd still like some help with this - what's confusing me is the fact that the align tool (and similar modify tools) "snaps" to the centerline of the annotation (which is aligned with the centerline of the receptacle model), but as you can see, the actual aligning dotted line is shifted to the right. See below: 

Shifting my detail level to Fine shows that this dotted line seems to be lined up with the side face of the receptacle cover. Had to reselect an aligning plane, but note that it lines up properly with the "2" in the receptacle tag:

Also in Fine detail level, I can successfully choose the the midline of the receptacle model as the aligning plane, but this seems like a tedious workaround when I much prefer to keep my electrical diagrams in Medium detail. 

Any ideas as to why this behavior occurs at coarser detail levels? Or ideas of how to fix it? This is still leading me to think it has to do with the annotation symbol, but indirectly.

[RobDraw]

I don't really have anything for you right now. This has me a bit stumped and the snapping to one place and shifting to another seems like it may be some sort of bug. You could try playing with the reference planes "Is Reference" settings to see if you can change the behavior.

[dmiller_SCE · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous you are snapping to the center plane of the nested generic annotation, which as you see is somewhat problematic. Try selecting the center reference plane of the actual box geometry. It should be much smaller in size and in the wall.  The example below is with OOTB family and template at coarse detail. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that tip! I'll be aligning it from the geometry centerline from here on (and advising my coworkers of the same). 

I went into Edit Family and messed with the Front view, because it's actually the Bottom of the receptacle when looking from a floor plan view? Go figure. Next, I switched the Is Reference setting of the two left- and rightmost reference planes from Weak Reference to Not A Reference. Then I loaded the family back into the project and I now could not select the nested annotation as an alignment plane for some reason? I could still snap to the receptacle's geometry centerline, as that was a separate reference plane (that one is set to Center (Left/Right)). 

I reopened the family and turned the same reference planes back to Weak Reference and loaded it back in again. This time it stayed the same, and it would only allow me to snap to the receptacle's small geometry-based Center (Left/Right) plane. I guess this is better, as I can't accidentally snap to the nested annotation center, but I don't know what I changed!

So this is problem solved for now, I guess. I'm still curious as to what caused this bug, so if you read this and you actually know something more, drop it into this thread. I certainly would be happy to learn about it.