RevitXT to the rescue (again).

We get wide range of Revit questions in support as part of the support we offer to our subscription customers. Some are easy to address and some require a good deal of thought.

Sometimes though, we simply hit a brick wall when we are dealing with a limitation in Revit.

In the last little while we have had several tricky cases where RevitXT has been instrumental in providing a solution that cannot be found in Revit alone.

We had a case where a Family had been created with a shared instance parameter that needed to be changed. If you try to update a shared parameter, then overwrite the Family you find, to your dismay that Revit will reset the instance parameters back to the defaults.

The solution was to select the Family, use RevitXT BIMQuery to extract the shared parameter values and export as an Excel Spreadsheet. Next you open the Family and make the new shared parameter to replace the old one. You then go into the Project and use the reload function to over-write the Family. This resets all the instance parameters to their defaults as we expect.

The magic-juice is to now select all instances of the Families again and then use BIMQuery. We import the spreadsheet we made before back in. It has all of the instance parameters that we lost a minute ago. All we need to do now is overwrite the name of the parameter in BIMQuery.

Interestingly when we hit “apply and close” and select the Family again we now have the old shared parameter alongside the new one.

The good news is, the newly created shared parameter is the one that controls the Family and all we have to do is go back into our new Family again and the delete the old parameter that we wanted to get rid of.

I have other examples of things that we have used RevitXT to do that I can share in other posts if customers wish.