Bug? Reload Family after purge...

[Matthew Stuver]

Hello All,

I've been away from the office for a week (had a baby boy) and when I started back up with my Revit MEP project I found something odd. Let me paint a picture for you...

Basically I have my light switches that I insert, naming them up, down, left and right due to the text rotation problem. ( I know it is not a problem, but I would like all of my text to face the same way...) Under each one I have 19 or so subscripts that I can place next to a switch to show different devices. When I came back from vaca and opened my file I noticed only a few of them are available for me to pick from, the ones that are inserted into the model. I asked the guys around the office if they had purged the drawing, but they said no, which may not be true.

Anyways, I went in and tried to reload the families, but that did not work. I opened a family, took a peek inside and everything was there (all of the listings of different switches), I reloaded it into the file, and that still did not work. For some reason it is not recognizing the file and all of the family types. I just renamed the file and inserted it into the model for a quick fix, but does anyone have any idea on how to fix this problem? I have attached a jpg showing what I get in the system browser and the new family name file for a quick fix. Is there some sort of setting that needs to be clicked?

Any help on this would be great.
Thanks,
Matt

[mhartmann]

i have run into this too. the way i got all my types back in the project was to open the family, and go to family types, change to one of the types that's not in your project and hit apply, setting it as the current type. then do a load into project and they should all show up. this is just a "fix" as well, it should just reload in all the family types when you reload it into the project.

[kyle.bernhardt]

The families are not being loaded into your existing project because Revit did not determine that there was a difference between the family definition in the project and the definition in the catalog. The trigger that Revit uses to determine that is the timestamp on the Family Definition.

That may change in the future, and you're welcome to point out the approach's shortcomings (I'm pretty sure I already know them) but that is the way it works today.

The way you get around this, as already pointed out, is to make a trivial change the Family Definition and re-save the file. This will update the timestamp and trigger Revit the load the Family Definition from the Catalog.

I hope that clears things up.

Cheers,
Kyle B

[truevis]

...That may change in the future, and you're welcome to point out the approach's shortcomings (I'm pretty sure I already know them) but that is the way it works today.

The way you get around this, as already pointed out, is to make a trivial change the Family Definition and re-save the file. This will update the timestamp and trigger Revit the load the Family Definition from the Catalog....

I have noticed it, too. The types really need to be loaded back in when loading the family after purging the unused types. The current behavior is bad and wrong. It is not intuitive and not useful. Making a minor change to a family is not a good solution because RFAs are often in a read-only place for obvious reasons.

The current behavior discourages purging, which should be a good practice to optimize performance.

The only workaround I know of is to rename the reduced family, load in the original and do multiple select-all-instances/change types. Blecch.