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Thursday, February 22, 2018

Managing Detail References in a Door Schedule with Global Parameters

A typical project has several drafting views representing a door's head, jamb and sill condition. These drafting views are organized on sheets, and each has a unique drawing number. The drawing and sheet number are then referenced in the Door Schedule as shown in the first image below.

The problem is, this is all manually entered text as there is no way to refer directly to the drafting views from here. Schedule Keys are not practical because there are too many door combinations and those schedule cannot use Shared Parameters.

While there are certainly some add-in workflows that would work, this post will share how to use Revit's newer Global Parameters to at least ease the pain when it comes to managing all this manually entered text.


On the Manage tab, open the Global Parameters dialog as shown below. In this dialog you...
create one Global Parameter for each drafting view; using a common prefix to keep them all grouped together everywhere they show up. Then, you manually enter the current drawing and sheet number (Value) to each detail as shown here.


Now, when you select a door in the model, instead of entering the head detail reference manually, you click the little icon to the right to associate that instance parameter with a Global Parameter as shown here. The result is a live reference to the Value entered for the selected Global Parameter; the value is shown in properties, but is grayed out... the icon now shows an equals sign as well.


When you click the associate parameter icon, for the door head detail parameter, for example, this is the dialog we see. You do not see the value here, which is too bad, so you need to make the names meaningful.


Now, if a detail needs to move to another sheet, or the drawing numbers need to change on a sheet, just edit the handful of Values in the Global Parameters dialog and you are good to go!

Still not a perfect, pure-BIM, workflow but a little better than manually entering all the text we see in the first image above.

For more on Global Parameters be sure to check out Tim Waldock's RevitCat blog: Index for Global Parameters in Revit

What have you been using Global Parameters for? Share int he comment below.

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