I'm opening up this issue to my clever readers out there to either enlighten me or corroborate my situation. Imagine a structural support that we'll refer to as a pipe support. If it helps, something like this:
I'm referring to the green "column" and "beam" with the tabs at the ends of the beam to counter potential "roll-off" in a seismic situation. The obvious way to make a family for this is to nest a column and beam family, use a Family Type parameter to swap between sizes when they are placed in the project. I write obvious because it would be nice to be able to use the standard framing families and types to choose the relevant form and configuration.
Everything is pretty straightforward until I attempt to change the type. The length of the Beam resists being constrained if I change the Type. I've managed to get it to work but it tends to break as soon as the beam size is changed.
The puzzler is... has anyone been able to get nested beams to behave when managing the "in-use" type with a Family Type parameter?
Working around the issue, a couple solutions come to mind.
If the Structural Framing beams are not used I can get it to work easily so that suggests a conflict with the category behavior (the structural framing template). If I build my own beams and columns using the same profiles and type catalogs it will work. Unfortunately that means we'd end up with "different" beams/columns than the other "real" beams and columns when we think of schedules.
The other solution might be to use the API to get the information that the user needs to supply and let the API create a custom family from the parts and build/insert on-the-fly. Like the Frame Generator extension does for Revit Structure.
Comments?
I'm referring to the green "column" and "beam" with the tabs at the ends of the beam to counter potential "roll-off" in a seismic situation. The obvious way to make a family for this is to nest a column and beam family, use a Family Type parameter to swap between sizes when they are placed in the project. I write obvious because it would be nice to be able to use the standard framing families and types to choose the relevant form and configuration.
Everything is pretty straightforward until I attempt to change the type. The length of the Beam resists being constrained if I change the Type. I've managed to get it to work but it tends to break as soon as the beam size is changed.
The puzzler is... has anyone been able to get nested beams to behave when managing the "in-use" type with a Family Type parameter?
Working around the issue, a couple solutions come to mind.
If the Structural Framing beams are not used I can get it to work easily so that suggests a conflict with the category behavior (the structural framing template). If I build my own beams and columns using the same profiles and type catalogs it will work. Unfortunately that means we'd end up with "different" beams/columns than the other "real" beams and columns when we think of schedules.
The other solution might be to use the API to get the information that the user needs to supply and let the API create a custom family from the parts and build/insert on-the-fly. Like the Frame Generator extension does for Revit Structure.
Comments?
