Legends and Instance Parameters

[jcoe]

Someone in our office is creating door and frame type legends using the legend tool. They noticed that when they changed the borrowed lite dimension in the model and added that component to the legend, it did not report the change. The legend is only reporting what the size of the borrowed lite was when it was first loaded into the project.

The door panels are behaving as expected in the legend. The only thing that comes to mind is that the door panels are "type" parameters and the borrowed lite is an "instance" parameter. So I tested this with other components and sure enough, the legend components do not seem to read instance parameters from objects in the project.

I am curious to know if someone might have an explanation as to why the legends do not read changes in the instance parameters of families.

[sfaust]

Because it wouldn't know which one to read. you can have two instances with different settings in the project, so which one should it copy?

That being said, there should be a way to adjust instance parameters for a legend representation, and there is none that I know of...

[ThinkRevit]

I build Type Catalogs for some of the largest firms. Many of these Catalogs have thousands of Types. Please note that these Catalogs are the product of complex spreadsheets as a means to keep the information manageable. Building large Type Catalogs with the exact Parameters ensures Parametric Values have been loaded with no room for User error. I keep Instance Parameters limited to Values like door swing Angles or Line Based Families (Integers). Most of these firms instruct Users not to Change Type Values as that is the job of the person setting up the data (Type Catalog).

[Alfredo Medina]

...I am curious to know if someone might have an explanation as to why the legends do not read changes in the instance parameters of families.

Because, at the moment, legends don't really work as architectural offices really want them to work. Other alternatives are:


Elevation views of the object you want to show in the legend.
Objects in a special phase, not used for anything else, from which you can create elevations and sections of the objects.
Assemblies
Design options
A third party application such as Dynamic Legends


There is a blog article about legends, by my friend Martijn de Riet, that you might find useful to learn about the different methods mentioned above, except Dynamic Legends. The link to the article is: http://blog.revitforum.org/2012/08/how-to-deal-with-legends-in-revit.html