Friday, April 24, 2009

New Filter Categories added in 2010

I believe that it was in Revit Structure 2009 that the "Level" category was added to the filters tool when creating a "Define Criteria" filter. We used this to auto hide those additional levels that we created to reference geometry to. These additional levels usually were not required to be displayed in our views. What we did was created a "Define Criteria" filter that was set to find any Level whose Type name contained "Hide in View". This filter was then applied to our view templates where its visibility was set to be turned off in the Visibility/Graphics Overrides, within the Filter tab.


I have been waiting for the "Section" category to be added as well, and with Revit Structure 2010 my wish has come true. Callouts, Elevations, and the Section category have been added. We can now do the same thing with our working sections. These are a section type that we create for working in the model. These sections will never be put on a sheet and will not plot as long as check the "Hide unreferenced view tags" checkbox in the Print Setup options. That was all great, but users were starting to work around them with other annotation and text as if they were going to plot when they would not. Below shows our working sections showing up in a documentation view.


Here is the filter we created to keep them removed: (the Filter tool can be found on the View Ribbon tab in the Graphics panel)

If a working section needs to become a Project Section you just have to switch its Type and it reappears beause it no longer meets the criteria of the fitler. You can filter by whatever criteria works for you.

The 2009 work around was to set our working views one scale above our documentation views. Working sections were only to be cut in a working view. This way the sections "Hide at scales coarser than" instant parameter was set such that it would not display in a view whose scale was coarser than the working view. This worked pretty good as long as the users were following the rules. I like the filter method much better.

Thank you Factory for this addition. It's these little things that can make certain task go just a little bit smoother.