Friday, November 21, 2008

Where's my drafting view referenced?

A workflow I see all the time is for users to create a series of drafting views for "standard" details and reference them in sections, elevations or callouts on various views. Some get referenced once, but some are referenced multiple times (one-to-many relationship). Think foundation details for example. You can have multiple cuts that reference the same view, whether it's a drafting view or a live detail section that was annotated and embellished.

Revit tells us where a view is referenced in the View Properties.

View Properties

But this only tells us the first view that referenced our other view. There is no way of finding out which other sections, elevations or callouts reference a particular view. We know that Revit is aware of this information, but it gives us no way to tap into it. Perhaps a good use of the API to create such a tool?

When right clicking a view name, you can also use the Find Referring Views option and you'll get some more information, but this isn't exactly what I'm after as it just reports what level it's referenced on (and other information if available).

Find Referring Views

So here's what I would like to have Revit do:

  • Select a view and have an option to have all the referencing annotation highlight, similar to when you click on a live section (one to one relationship) and it highlights on the view.
  • Have additional parameters in a View List that would report the referencing view names/detail numbers.

What prompted this is that we had a drafting view detail that potentially applied to other conditions around the building. The area that referenced this drafting view changed, so we needed to make some dimensional adjustments, yet we were not sure if this was being referenced elsewhere. We need to check if that's the case before making adjustments and causing problems in other areas. Obviously if you cut and detail live sections, you would not have this issue, but we all know that it's not feasible to do so for repeated conditions.


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1 comments:

DC said...

Until Revit supplies something built in purposely to remedy this issue, there is a trick to make all referenced views pop out on plan. Simply change the title to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or whatever key you feel like holding down and they will be easy to identify and check for relevance on the plan.

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