Family linked to a grid reference

[Kenny Gee]

A job had come up where I need to place a heap of families around a room along with creating a tight grid. The fixtures need to be located by a grid reference (like B12) - similar to a map reference.
Is there a way that this information can be scheduled???????? or can some1 suggest another method??????

[Dimitri Harvalias]

The first thing that comes to mind is to use room separation lines to define your grid, assign a room number to each square and then just extract the room information from the placed elements.
Just out of curiosity, who is dictating this requirement and why?

[Kenny Gee]

The client wants this information as they need to track all families throughout numerous sites. Plus all these families will virtually look identical (apart from very detailed parameters) therefore a grid reference needs to be created.

Room separation sounds like a good idea but my space will have multiple rooms so i don't see how this will work for my case.

[Kenny Gee]

Any1 got any ideas???

[Steve_Stafford]

How about the Mark parameter, built in already. Supply the unique "grid" value each fixture requires in that field. Revit doesn't like duplicate Mark values so it will complain if you create one mistakenly. You can schedule the value naturally. Revit will even automatically number them if you place one, set the starting mark value and then place the rest in the correct sequence.

[Kenny Gee]

Thanks Steve
But I though there may have been a less manual way to set this up. I though of a grid reference as this will be published within the dwf's as a method of locating each fixture whilst cross referencing with the schedules.
If no other way becomes obvious the I will have to use your way.

Cheers

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Kenny, maybe I'm not understanding the requirement correctly but check out the sample file of the solution I suggested.
If other documentation is required that involves room numbers then the location grid could be done in a file where the orignal is linked in and the walls are no longer room bounding.

[Kenny Gee]

Thanks Dimitri
Scene works well. It would be nice though if I could have rooms within rooms. For example have a building with all different rooms defined and tagged, then I could use this grid approach to locate fixture/families.
Another request has been made by management is that they want to be able to track/schedule where each fixture/family were previously located (as these fixtures get moved around constantly). This previous history would then contain attributes documenting past fixture stats etc.... Sorry for being vague with my description.

[Steve_Stafford]

This is sounding more and more like an asset management task that software like ARCHIBUS does? Revit does not track the history of an elements usage like where it was placed.

A recent example a client was curious about is chairs...they own a lot of chairs and they'd like to know where they are and how many they need if they hire some new people or if they can lend some to another department. While Revit could probably be set up to let them do some of this it wouldn't be able to tell them where a given chair had been over the last couple years unless we stored the information in the Revit database somewhere and that could be reviewed by someone later in a schedule.

The chairs that aren't used would have to be moved to another "room" for storage which might not really be in the same building or buildings. Another issue is which chair is which? A SKU code could be placed on each chair and an "equal" element placed in Revit but the connection isn't real. The chair gets broken and thrown away but the Revit model doesn't get changed and now there is no "trust" in the data...and when trust fades the use of the model will too...