Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Revit 2016 - Multiline Text Parameter and Shared Parameters

As soon as we add a new parameter using this new Multiline Text parameter type to our existing Shared Parameter file it invalidates that file for use in prior versions of Revit. If we try to access our Shared Parameter file we'll be greeted with this message.


Mulling it over for a moment, it makes sense to me since the older versions of Revit are not able to interpret this new kind of parameter because it didn't exist. Rather than allow us to continue, to create a parameter that isn't supported, it takes the hard road and prevents us from using it at all. It might be possible, via another Update Release to 2015 and for the other older supported versions, to provide code to ignore any Multiline Text values it finds when it parses a Shared Parameter file.

This means we'll need to create a separate shared parameter file for managing any Multiline Text parameters we use. We can keep on using the original Shared Parameter file(s) we already have. Just don't add any new Multiline Text parameters to it. We need to manage this new parameter type on its own, as long we expect to need to use the older versions of Revit.

Oh, if you manage to do this before finding out it won't work...you can open the Shared Parameter file in Notepad and delete the line that is dedicated to the Multiline Text parameter(s) you've created. It should work again in 2015 or older versions.

A comment (to a previous post) regarding this new feature alerted me to this issue, thanks Abe!

2 comments:

Matt Taylor said...

I found this issue in Revit 2013, thanks to the introduction of the 'Density' parameter type.
I make a separate 'extras' shared parameter file for each version (if I need it).

Typical Revit behaviour though...no backwards compatibility. It makes for faster development, but sucks for the end user.

Lionel Camara said...

This may be a relatively moot point now (as most projects should be using 2016-2018), but I wouldn't recommend keeping a separate SP file just for a different type - it'll wind up making a mess if you have the wrong one selected when creating parameters, and you have to switch back & forth when loading them - it's better to keep a separate file for the different versions. Personally, I keep the SP file in our custom version-library folder (so there's actually one for each version) and use Beyond Compare to manage changes, but just keeping two (pre-2016 and 2016+) would be fine if you also have a "common" custom folder (because then you can just forget about the pre-2016 one when you stop working with old projects - which for us will be sometime after November 2018, when we can finally send our last Revit 2013 project out the door...).