Wall (Jamb) width in Door Schedule?

[orwake]

How would I go about including the wall thickness in a door schedule so that the jamb width (necessary information!) would be readily identified. This would need to change for each door location depending on what wall type the door is placed in. I tried to place a labeled dimension in the door family editor for the wall thickness but can't get it to "lock" to the face of the generic wall that the door is placed in. Any help?

[dnilsson]

I may be wrong, but I don't think there is anyway to get a door to look at it's hosted wall and report the thickness. Plus, in reality there are standard sizes for frames so you would want it to "step-up" the size as needed. Again, as far as I know this is not yet possible. What is possible is to create door families that have instance parameters for the jamb depth (whether they actually control geometry or not is up to you) and then schedule that. You would preset the various jamb sizes as family types so all the user would need to do is select the proper one. Of course, this relies on the user so it's open to error.

[orwake]

Thanks for your reply, D

How is it that objects such as door and windows can "see" the thickness of a host wall & adjust for it accordingly and place trim, etc in the right planes without a method to report that information? It seems that a dimension label attached to the right reference planes/lines should accomplish this but then again I am not very well versed in family creation. In my area, residential wood jambs are custom run to any size, not just standard frame sizes and I have many different wall types with many different thicknesses. I don't want to depend on manual input of this info. if there is any way to avoid it. I guess this brings up a more general question of how to schedule parameters of elements in relation to their hosts. . .

I would appreciate any more input you or others might share,

Thanks,

Orin

[aaronrumple]

Does the door know? Of course. It just isn't reported via the door.


The Revit API could be used to extract this information.

[orwake]

Okay Aaron,

I did a search here in the forums and in the Revit helps and do not see API. Can you tell me what that is and how to access it?

Thanks,

Orin

[greg.mcdowell]

I made a door family that changes the dimensions of the frame to a set of predefined sizes (just like in real life) until the wall reaches a width that exceeds some value. I suppose if I wanted to schedule the frame size I could create another parameter that looks at which frame size is being used and report it... I tried something like this before (minus the parameter that looks at another) but didn't get very far. I'll try to remember to upload the file Monday.

[aaronrumple]

Okay Aaron,

I did a search here in the forums and in the Revit helps and do not see API. Can you tell me what that is and how to access it?

Thanks,

Orin
Application Programing Interfacce
You would need a custom program written.

[dnilsson]

Hey Greg, if you see this would you mind posting that family file? I'd like to see how that formula works.

[greg.mcdowell]

See... I knew I'd forget <grin>

[patricks]

We usually just show frame depth in details, using a detail for each frame type in each type of wall, and leave it to the door supplier to get the different frame types and depths on his shop drawings.

[dbaldacchino]

When plunging into family creation as a beginner, one thing I though of and tried to do (with no success, since it's not possible) was to schedule the wall type that the door is inserted into. If this was possible, I could presumably designate the head/jamb/sill detail parameters based on the wall type automatically for each door type. It would save us a lot of time and ensure good coordination.

[JamesVan]

It seems that a dimension label attached to the right reference planes/lines should accomplish this but then again I am not very well versed in family creation.
This is a logical assumption, but Revit's reference planes and parameters are one-directional. This means that a parameter drives a dimension, which drives the reference planes. You can't have the reference planes feed a dimension - in turn, feeding a parameter. This is the conundrum we face with the ability to generate a curtain panel schedule indicating the dimensions of each individual panel, but being unable to use these dimensions in geometrical parameters back in the families.

[s.messing]

This is a logical assumption, but Revit's reference planes and parameters are one-directional. This means that a parameter drives a dimension, which drives the reference planes. You can't have the reference planes feed a dimension - in turn, feeding a parameter. This is the conundrum we face with the ability to generate a curtain panel schedule indicating the dimensions of each individual panel, but being unable to use these dimensions in geometrical parameters back in the families.Thanks for the explanation. I just figured this out the hard way. A project in my office has 1000 doors in a schedule and now they are asking if I can get the schedule to read wall thicknesses. After the whole "I love investigating" trial and error thing, I came up with a user's explanation of this issue: I can't get it to work. Tomorrow I have to go back to the team and tell them it's not possible, unless......
Anybody got a workaround?

Thanks,
Stephen

[jamie.casile80054]

Is there really no work around for this? I know that there are some contractors who are using Revit to coordinate and schedule their projects. How do you (contractors and builders) determine the number of door frames of a specific thickness you will need?
thanks,
jamie

[dbaldacchino]

Well, I came up with a piece of a solution I guess, but I can't get past it. Here's where I'm at and what I can't figure out.

I created a simple, shared family with two ref planes (strong references) and a labeled dimension (sharerd instance parameter) called "Wall Width". You can assign this family to any category you want, but let's say you assign it to Specialty Equipment.

I nest this into a door family and align and lock the two ref planes to the faces of the wall. Now I load this door in a project and insert several instances in vaying wall widths. I created a Specialty Equipment schedule and included "Wall Width" as a parameter. The schedule reports the wall width of each instance correctly. So this is the partial solution. The problem is that I cannot find any way to report which specialty equipment instance is nested in what door, thus being able to connect this "Wall Width" to an actual door. If I could connect the door Mark to a parameter in the specialty equipment family, I could sort out a door schedule and a specialty equipment schedule and align them side by side on a sheet, but the parameter "Mark" is an instance parameter and is only available once the door family is loaded in a project. So there's no way to connect it to another parameter.

The problem with shared families is that they don't report what their host/nested family is. Or perhaps I might be missing some trick that someone came across. Any hints/suggestions? Most Shared families can report which room they're but it seems impossible to tie them to a host, which is what I need to do in the above example.

[Tom Dorner]

We tried this back in early 2005 and ran into the same dead-end.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=15794&highlight=wall+width+parameter

Read only parameters of wall thickness and phase created/demolished would give us many options to automate familes and schedules.