Thursday, September 03, 2015

Finding Families - IDs of Selection

When we need to track down a family that might be loaded into one or more project files we can use master schedule project that includes links for all the relevant project files. If one of the project files already has links to all the others then we can just use that one for this instead.

A schedule focused on the relevant category that also uses the option Includes elements in links can be quite useful.


It can help us track down which models and how many there are in each of them. A little clever use of the Filter tab in the schedule can be a big help. Once we've figured out where the family is we can deal with each of them in each project.

We can search through the Families branch of the Project Browser and then use the right click option for Select all Instances in Entire Project.


Now I can reach for IDs of Selection.


Revit provides a list of Element ID numbers for each family.


It is not unusual for the list to be quite long so I often reach for Notepad (or better still Notepad++...which reminds me I need to install it on this new PC). I use CTRL+C to copy the element IDs to the clipboard and then CTRL+V in Notepad. Notice the commas between the Element ID numbers.


In Notepad I can be selective about which ones to start examining more closely. I just select one or more of the element IDs and then use Select Element by ID (CTRL+C and CTRL+V again in reverse).


Notice the instruction in parenthesis (in the image below)? It says to use a semicolon between the numbers but Revit used commas earlier. Odd.


...and...believe it or not, this is the reason I decided to write this post... commas work too. Yeah, that's definitely subtle.

As for the element hunting and selecting process, I'll be interested and waiting to see what sort of Dynamo approaches pop up in comments.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Congrats on the new PC!
Hope your significant other won't find out the podcast you've explained how your old laptop was doing OK :)

Steve said...

Seems my complimenting it's longevity encouraged it to retire, it "died" badly enough to warrant giving up on it.

Shahab Khalaj said...

A space between the ID's works as well. No need for comma or semicolon. For example, "1908412 1908445 1908476" works just fine for selecting the elements.