Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Type Catalog Quirkieness

So, was working on Type Catalogs today and came across an interesting quirk. If you're creating a type catalog that is going to populate built-in parameters you have to make sure that while creating the family you've put a value into that parameter at some point (even if you want to leave it blank in the end). It would seem that the blank parameters carry some type of null value by default. For instance my Type Catalog was supposed to populate the "Description" parameter, however I never bothered plugging any data in, as I knew I was just going to build a Type Catalog. However, when I went to load the family the family loaded properly, but I got a warning that the Description parameter did not exist! Obviously as a built-in parameter it is/was there. When I went back to the family, I added a value to the Description parameter, saved, deleted the value, and magically the Type Catalog worked correctly. The interesting thing to note here is that once a value is added it can be deleted, but its no longer a <null> value, so it will carry through the load process when using a Type Catalog.

As another update, house construction is progressing, interior fitout is coming along, cabinets are installed and painting is just getting started.


2 comments:

Erik said...

Same issue drove NUTS for awhile.

http://whosafraidofthebigbadbim.blogspot.com/2009/03/revit-type-catalog-tip.html

tucker_arch said...

I ran into this when I took an OOTB Family and wanted to quickly add a bunch of types. Something that should have taken 10min drove me nuts for 2 hours.

Now I put a '-' (dash) in any text based field so this does not happen.