Linking Views?

[michaelf]

I'll try to set this up the best I can, so that you folks can understand my issue and help me and my team figure out this issue:

We have a multi-family housing project that consists of nine (9) unique buildings. Because of all the buildings being in the same central file, caused Revit to operate EXTREMELY slow, we separated each building into its own central file, giving us 9 central files. Each of these buildings however, contains similar unit plans that we have grouped (i.e Unit A1, A2, B1, etc). We have also created skin groups for those units, that we tried to copy across the nine buildings. These skin groups at times, variate across the project, and will need to be detailed. We also (for the time being) have all of our sheets for each building contained in their respective file.

My question is: WIth this set up, what would be the best way to detail our unit plans (and their variations), details, schedules, etc....and any other thing that would be similar across a whole project? The problem we are encountering is that we can detail a unit plan view in say Building 2, but a variation of that (which we'll have to detail for construction at some point and want on the same sheet) is only contained in say Building 3. We would want those two views contained on the same sheet, but if they're in different files, how do you do that? You can't link views, can you?

If I wasn't clear enough in my explanation of the set-up or my questions, please feel free to ask. Any help that you people can offer will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[Revitator]

We haven't yet found a way of linking (model) views.

We would tend to keep the unit plans in their own rvt files, and link or group them into the building rvts. Linking auto-updates, but grouping gives you more flexibility (you can exclude elements, for example).

Either way, you can place one copy of each unit plan into a 'common' .rvt file, and detail them there. It adds complexity to the file structure (and one more thing to update if you're using groups), but you do get all the details on the same sheet.

[patricks]

You can create views of linked models and place them on a sheet.

On an earlier project, we had a large warehouse building on a site, with several smaller buildings around the campus. I had a file for the main building, and another file containing all the small buildings which I linked into the main building file. I had all of my casework elevations from the main building on one sheet, but I had only one elevation from the other file. So in my main building file, I placed an elevation view inside the linked building, and presto! I had an interior casework elevation of my linked file which I could place on the same sheet with all of my other elevations.

The catch, though, is that in my file with the small buildings, I had to use dummy sheets and place those same elevations on sheets with the same sheet number as where I placed the view in the main file.

[Revitator]

Yes, I can see how that would work. You'd have to keep the two sets of elevation views synchronised (the ones in the main building file that appear on sheets and the ones in the small buildings file that just appear as references), but that's not so bad.

I think in this case, we just want to link a view on its own, without having to link the rest of the rvt file: There's no spatial relation between the linked view and the rest of the views on the sheet, but there's an informational one (they all describe the same type of construction, for example)

[Chris DiSunno]

This is a real issue which I hope ADSK takes seriously. I have a residential project in which I have the residence, a poolhouse, garage w/ apartment, outdoor kitchen & firepit, & trellis pool area. Way too much information for one central file, however it would be right to link each structure to a main project file which would contain all the sheets and views.

Perhaps this could be managed if a project linked within a project could be made "active" like a workset. Hopefully this could be done in a way as to not require the memory to run the entire sites content. Then all the views are only in the Master Central Project.