Monday, February 09, 2015

Tags and Instance Parameters

I was thinking it would be nice to be able to create an instance parameter to turn on/off graphics in a given tag. Create one tag, place many and toggle on and off various parts. Revit says, "No, sorry Steve you can't do that."

Tags require us to create Types. The yes/no parameters turned on/off in each type as required. Then place a tag type that shows what you want to see or switch to a different type.

Making it possible to use instance parameters is a pretty common request, even reasonable perhaps. However, doing so would mean we couldn't trust that a given tag and type would be displaying all the information it is supposed to show without visiting each and every tag to verify.

Thus far that risk seems to have justified locking it down to only type based tag behavior.

3 comments:

Tenface said...

I have 3 families each with 6 types for pipes and it's similar with ducts. I don't know anyone who uses tag all when tagging pipes or ducts. When placing duct tags you have to check to see if the tags contain the right information anyway. You said it's a common request and it's reasonable. I see no justification in locking it down to only types if users want it and it can be useful.

Unknown said...

It would be VERY helpful to be able to control things like lines around room numbers in Room Tags on a case-by-case basis, which requires Instance Parameters. I actually tried doing this, and the family editor will allow you to make Instance Parameters, it just will not show them to you when you select them. I thought I was doing something wrong.

It would be easy enough to allow them globally, and as I said, VERY useful. Having a global switch (by default set to how things operate now) to allow Instance Parameters would provide the best of both worlds; for those of us that want it and those who want what we've always had.

As an aside, this is part of my pet-peeve with Revit - hidden functionality. At the very least, making an Instance Parameter in the family editor should come with a warning that it will not be displayed. Either that, or they should be displayed and marked as disabled. This is similar to the newish idea that selecting a grey button actually does something useful - this violates a long-standing principle of UI design - that if a button/icon/UI element is greyed-out, then that 'feature' is not available in this context. Aside over.

Curty said...

Perhaps this could be made available for graphic elements only Autodesk?