Monday, April 30, 2007

Dependant Views and Hide in View - Elements

The new feature (Revit 2008 products) Duplicate View > Dependant Views is intended to provide an exact copy of the parent view but allow you to crop the view differently making it easier to document in an overall view but show partial plans on sheets. This makes it simpler to manage annotation and avoid the copy/paste process of putting annotation in various duplicate views.


Take care when you use the new feature (Revit 2008 products) Hide in View however.

If you use this feature either in a parent view or a dependant view the hidden element is only hidden in the view you do it in. The other view(s) are not affected. In my opinion, this is not consistant with the implied behavior of parent/dependant views. I believe that when we hide an element in a parent view, the dependant views should also have that element hidden. The view specific behavior should be limited to non-dependant views. As it is now, remember we must un-hide/hide this element in each view.

5 comments:

Dustin said...

I agree - when you hide/unhide something in a parent or child view it should be reflected on all dependent views.

rgesner said...

By the time they fix this, there will be existing projects which the fix would break, so they will have to fix it by providing a switch that enables your choice of either proper parent/dependent behavior or the current behavior.

Anonymous said...

You are correct that this project was intended to manage annotations over split views, which is precisely why hide per element is not persistent across dependent views. If you would like to hide an annotation in all related views, it should be deleted. Remember, these are view-specific elments, so they will not be missed in other non-related views if deleted (I know it's hard to kick old CAD habits).

Now here's the use case this behavior was intended for. Let's say you have split up your plan and done all the annotations in the parent view. Now you throw down a matchline and place dependents on sheet. You realize that some of the annotations relevant to dependent view 2 are 'spilling' over the matchline and onto dependent view 1 and vice versa. In dep view 1 you can hide those annotations which are near the matchline just in that view but it will not mess up dep view 2 nor will it mess up the parent view.

If you really want to hide an individual model element and have it be hidden in all related views, I would suggest using a filter.

Hope that helps.

Steve said...

For annotation elements this makes sense but you can also use this feature to manage the visibility of model elements and users are just as likely if not more so to use it for them. As long as users understand the conditions and implications of using the feature it can be managed but it is another thing that will affect quality control and require proactive checking.

Anonymous said...

if you hide an element and switch views, how do you unhide the element when you return to the view in which it was hidden?