Thursday, January 24, 2008

Acquire Coordinates - Confirm?

This week I was discussing the role of Shared Coordinates with a group and we went through the motions involved to use a civil file as the defining coordinate system for our project. The tool Acquire Coordinates, found via Tools menu > Shared Coordinates is used to do this. It is a simple process, Select the tool, select an import symbol...

What has bothered me in the past and again this week, enough so that I finally wrote it down...is that when you do as Revit asks, select an Import Symbol, Revit doesn't visually DO anything to confirm or acknowledge or convince us that it has actually done anything. We have to use another tool found at the bottom of the same list, Tools menu > Shared Coordinates > Report Shared Coordinates to satisfy us that Revit has indeed acquired the coordinates.

On the other hand if you don't select a valid symbol or it has already been acquired at another time you do get a warning message.

This post is a lot of text to say, "I think Acquire Coordinates should confirm a successful transaction"? Seem reasonable? I thought so!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Steve,

I couldn't agree more!! The process of setting up a site survey drawing is fundmental when starting a new Revit project and like you said, a few warning messages to confirm a successful result shouldn't be a hardship.
What I currently do, is place a reference plane at a known point on the imported symbol. I then use the spot coordinate tool and place a coordinate at the intersection of the ref plane. I do this because you can't snap the coordinate to the imported symbol. When I then aquire the coordinates from the imported symbol, the coordinate should update to match the known coordinates of the imported symbol. If they match, then I know things have been successful, but a dialogue box would be a better option. :-)

Steve said...

Sorry David, you are responsible for me not getting to do any work in the UK. (Because you are doing great work there) Therefore I cannot, on principle, agree with anything you suggest. I hope you understand!


Okaaaaaaaay....Fine! Yes it IS a good idea to put a spot dimension at the origin! But to "One Up" your suggestion you must create a UCS icon for the spot dimension symbol to use! 8-)

Anonymous said...

How to get Shared Coordinates origin (N0 E0) using Revit API ?

Steve said...

If you are asking me how to get shared coordinate data using the API then I can't help you. You should ask your question at the AUGI Revit API forum.

http://forums.augi.com/forumdisplay.php?f=218

Dave Baldacchino said...

I know this is an old post, but to "close the loop", when you do acquire coordinates from a link, you can now see the result if you have your survey point visible in the view. That of course only works if the shared coordinate origin does need to move after the acquiring is complete!