Purge Unused - Categorical Wish and Dynamo

I wish we could choose a single category or several individual categories while using Purge Unused. The dialog defaults to selecting everything that is not used. It's normal to have things that just aren't used yet. That means a generic application of Purge Unused on everything will eliminate things we need, just haven't needed them yet.

I'd like to be able to click the Check None button and the check a box next to a category or categories.

I think the default presumption for Purge Unused should NOT be everything selected. We should have to deliberately do that using the Check All button instead.

It would be a lot faster than working through a long list of families and the unused types. Ideally (even ordinarily) the list wouldn't be long but I've seen some lists that go on and on...

For what it is worth, we can select a category and use NUM LOK + * to expand the whole branch of that category. Then we can select the first and last types in the branch followed by clicking OK to Purge Unused. It just takes a while for the list to respond when there are a few thousand types...yeah I know...that's a lot!

Regarding Dynamo

I pinged Julien Benoit about this and using Dynamo. In response he was kind enough to send me the graph below.

At the moment it leaves behind a Family with no types if the purging process eliminates types and there were no types in use. Given how quickly he responded to my question WITH an attachment, no complaints here! Thanks Julien! Check out Julien's blog while you are at it.

Purge Unused Wish

I find myself wishing, every now and then, for a right click option to Purge Unused Types on individual families, something like this.

Sure, I can right click > Select All Instances to see if it is enabled.

If it is then the type is in use. When it is disabled I can just move the cursor up to Delete. Now the type is gone. That's not too bad when there are a few types. When there are many types It would be faster if I could just right click on the family and choose Purge Unsed Types.

The Purge Unsed tool works too but, in my opinion, its liability is that it is searching the entire database, then when the dialog finally opens ALL the unused types are selected. We have to be careful to UnCheck All so we don't purge types we really want to keep. If I am really just interested in a single family it's a bit overzealous. I think it would be a nice addition.

Reducing Family File Size

We can use Purge Unused on a family as well as a project, assuming Revit finds anything that it thinks can be purged. A family can inherit size from imported CAD data and nested families too. Importing and exploding a CAD source file will add object style sub-categories, line patterns, materials, fill patterns, text styles etc. There may not be any in the family right now but if you didn't create the family from scratch yourself and know everything that it went through until you noticed its size, anything is possible.

I ran into some families recently that were all more than 15 MB each. I first used Save As to create a new family with a new name. This reduced the file size quite a bit. Then I used Purge Unused and between both actions the biggest final file was about 600 KB. If you use Save As on a file and it only decreases in size by about 10 KB then it's about as small as it can get. That's been my observation.

If I really want the original file name to carry on, I just rename it to something like MyFamily-temp.rfa and then rename the original and rename the new one to use the original name again. The key part is the Save As to a different name initially. I've never just overwritten the original though technically I suppose I could do that. I prefer to keep a copy of the original intact, just in case.

Worksets and Purge Unused

Today an adventurous Revit user thought he'd use Purge Unused unsolicted. This during a day long excursion into the workset environment with fourteen concurrent users. We discovered this when I gave the gang the task of sketching some interior partitions on "their" floors and we were a bit surprised to find only three walls in the project. So I casually commented that could only happen if someone chose to delete them or use Purge Unused. At this point one of our gang volunteered, "oh I did that!". Much laughter and conversation ensued between the rest of us.

To fix the problem of missing stuff, we used Transfer Project Standards. That's when bumped into the next issue or gotcha.

If you create new elements in your local file while someone else uses Purge Unused in their local and they STC (Save to Central) first, guess what happens to your stuff.

It goes away! That's what!

Logical and consistent with the existing relationship of local files and central file. However it seems to me that Purge Unused ought to be a bit "smarter" or disabled except under special circumstances like working in a central with no other users or no other uses while in a local perhaps.

It was a first for me, nobody has used Purge Unused before without first asking about the feature. Remaining "half full" it's better that it happened during a training session than on a live project!