Search Sets for Revit and AutoCAD MEP

[david.kingham]

Here are some generic search sets I have put together for Revit and AutoCAD MEP.
The Revit search sets are based upon the Revit categories and the acadmep are based on the item type (not terribly extensive but it's a starting point)

I typically just use the one called "Revit Categories Folders" I have all the categories from each program (Arch, Struct, MEP) and seperated into folders

[john.hainsworth]

Great work David - very useful !

I've noted your posts re Plugins and API - so if you know a way now for search sets to be translated to (even just empty to start with) selection sets we should talk.

The reason for my asking is that Navis will import search sets such your xml files, but (obviously) not selection sets - its thats a huge shortfall or oversight in Timeliner that the latter can only be automatically mapped by rule to tasks from project management software.

hope that makes sense - and if not, trust me, it should be on the wish list, but I guess it will become superseded if 'the factory' are adding in better rules/rule wizard in future releases

[david.kingham]

Thanks John I hope they help, I'm going to put together some more for other programs once I find the time.

As for your question I'm a bit confused, first off you say you can't use search sets in timeliner, I think you're just a bit confused about the terminology. A search set is a selection set and saving the current selection is a selection set. I just tested it out to make sure I wasn't insane, created a search set and a task in timeliner named the same, checked the rule to automatically map and it worked fine.

I don't see how you could possibly save a selection out to another project because all the objects have unique identifiers and no project would have the same item, search sets are definitely the way to go.

[john.hainsworth]

David - I can explain further - brace yourself ;-)

What's needed is a workaround to the fact that you can't do an 'import --> selection sets' (as they will be empty), or that you can't generate selection sets from search sets and maintain the same name.

Why do we want to?

When using timeliner I'm always doing searches & saving them, and then manually attaching them to tasks - but to do this on complicated models with very complicated (1300+ line) ganntt programmes can be very time consuming and error prone (Remember the task names might be 'construct foundation' and will bear little resemblance to the objects names/ or type or categories or layers/material etc so to manually type those in in Navis is really frustrating)

So to make life easier I have managed to part cheat...

The good bit
Using the 'export --> search sets xml' function, I can modify that code to replace the search set name with task names from say MS Project and then afterwards 'import --> search sets xml' to get the 1300 tasks individually as search set listings and I have each one pointing to the same temporary element.

Then I can use a rule to map timeliner taks from column name to "selection sets with the same name matching case" and I get all 1300 tasks succesfully attached ;-)) Happy Days!

Now, the bad bit
The search is looking for the same thing everytime and coming up with the same object each time and so needs my attention.
I cannot select the actual object required to be tied to task and then 'right-mouse update' the search set so, is there a way to force Navis to generate selection sets that automatically have the same names as these 'selection searches' which came from the import --> search sets so that I can.
Otherwise I still have to highlight the search, right-mouse, saveas, and type in the name
1300 times !

So close yet so far.

I don't care if the objects in the selection sets are nonsensical, temporry or wrong intitally because I must alter the objects in them anyway - of course thats unless you have a better way ;-)

Very wordy I know, but I hope after reading a few time it makes sense - any thoughts would be greatly appreciated...

[david.kingham]

Here is a slightly updated version, I'm not sure what has changed so you'll have to verify that for yourselves :) I've also moved it to drop.io

http://drop.io/davidkingham/asset/navisworks-search-sets-xml