Does a door know where it is???

[aretap]

We are attempting to make a coordination schedule for doors that would point issues we might have with fire rated doors and the fire rating of the wall it is hosted by. So my question is, does a door know what wall is hosting is and thus is it possible to have a door schedule that could display the door fire rating parameter and in the same schedule could you have the fire rating of the wall that is hosting said door listed next to it????

[ford347]

I don't believe Revit recognizes or reports the type of host it is in nor reports specific parameters of the host it is in. I believe this has been on the wish list or has been requested for quite some time now. It would definitly be nice.

Josh

[DaveP]

You can pull many fields from the door itself, or from either the "To Room" of the "From Room", but you can't get anything from the wall.

I don't know too much about the API, but it's possible that you could get the host wall through the API.

[dbaldacchino]

Nope, there's no way I know of to filter doors and their hosts. I guess one thing you could try is build a door filter and wall filter to grab all non-fire rated doors and walls, and then turn off their visibility in a view, leaving only fire rated doors and walls. This way you can tell whether there are problems such as openings with no doors (where door was not fire rated) or floating doors (where wall was not designated as fire rated).

[antman]

Thanks for the workaround, Dave. Any chance this has been addressed in the 4+ years since this post?

[DoTheBIM]

Nope. .

[antman]

Nope. .

This is the first issue in a while that I've run into in Revit that I *really* wish I could do, and that I *can* do in AutoCAD Architecture.

Revit fanboy adjustment: -2

[jeffh]

This can be done via the API. Here is a link to an AU presentation from 2009.

http://images.dcheetahimages.com/au.autodesk.com/ama/images/media/AU_09_CP304-2-Presentation.pdf

On slide 34 of this presentation they show how this is done in the API. It does not have a lot of detail and it would probably be good to have the handout for the class too. You can always contact Jason Grant (one of the presenters) via his BLOG for more information on how to create teh API utility to do this.

http://jasongrant.squarespace.com/

[dbaldacchino]

Not a big fan of having to use the API for such a basic Architectural necessity. Booo! :)

I think the filter technique is still my top option to at least alert me if unrated doors are within rated partitions. As long as you can see which walls are fire rated (in a plan view), then you can easily assign the fire rating to doors that occur within those walls. Different firms do it in different ways: either by typing in a value for the fire rating or by having door types that correspond to the required rating (this is what we do at my current firm). I believe that Avatech was building some application to address this need but have not seen it on the market yet. Also keep in mind that fire-ratings for doors do not have a 1 to 1 mapping with wall fire-rating (ex: a 1 hr rated wall does not necessarily mean a 1 hour rated door....it could be 20 minutes, 45 minutes or 60 minutes, depending on the partition in question: is it a smoke barrier? Is it a fire barrier? Is it a fire-wall? Or a shaft enclosure? They all could be 1 hour rated walls but rating of opening protectives can vary). There are other variables that could impact the rating such as the type of construction and whether your building is fully sprinkled. Because of this, I'm almost of the opinion that such an exercise would be very hard to automate and should be left to us to make the right call, door by door and leave nothing to chance.

[antman]

All good points Dave.

I have accounted for the variations in ratings in ACA by creating different wall styles for fire wall, fire barrier, etc. Of course, that still doesn't automate *every* condition, so in exception cases I instruct people to create a new wall style and change the value. Most have no problem with this, but there are some who just don't 'get it' and are constantly frustrated that they can't change the property in the door itself, but rather in the wall.

As for intentionally having to think to make the right call vs. automation, yes, it can be a very fine line. I think it's important that everyone on the project team thinks about what they're doing. Quality Assurance checklists are very helpful. As an example - one of our AutoCAD project templates includes a very large list of sheets, details and general notes. There is time saved by including those up front, but you still have to go through them and check for project relevance. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if people are properly mentored, then providing data by default would mean that they wouldn't have to create it, NOT that they wouldn't have to think about it. <stepping off soapbox> .-)

I agree about the bummer of this only being available through API. I mean, really - if a code-illiterate like me could hack it together, surely the quality folks at the factory could make this a reality. Yes I'm a newbie, but sometimes newbies are the ones who do something simply because they haven't yet learned that it's impossible...