Better Electrical Control.. Sub Categories vs Filters

[cris8096]

My Electrical Department is pondering which way is the best way to go, either add sub categories into Families/Content and having Filters...

Me being a mechanical designer, I'm use too using Filters to control my systems, never had interest in adding sub categories..

I would love to hear people experience and ideas on this..

Thanks!

[Jrobker]

All of our equipment (families) are on sub-catagories.
All of our pipes and duct are driven by filters.

A little bit of both.

[cris8096]

Thanks for the feedback, would you mind if you take a snap shot for your Sub Categories and how your using them? In General Annotations and Categories??

Thanks!!

[moliva]

I think having sub-categories built into your families is a good idea even if you don't really need to use them. They would come in handy sometime where filters or worksets or any other visibility control just isn't enough. Plus if you keep different equipment types on different sub-categories you can have control over their appearance.

[Jrobker]

This is what we have so far in this particular project (attached image)

Moliva your exactly right.

If we need to show the medical air compressors, but no other equipment on the medical gas drawings, than we need to have more control than just the mechanical equipment category.

This is just how we prefer to do it.

[kalimazoop]

another advocate of sub-category object styles on the electrical side. We are using them, as much as possible, to control graphical display of objects for clients that have a different graphical standard than our comp standard. biggest problem that we run into is that you cannot turn on and turn off graphic annotation filled regions with an object style. It has to be assigned to a yes/no parameter. The work around ended up being creating solids(1/16" thick) and assigning the filled region material to them in the sub-category. autodesk knows about that issue, but never responds for a resolution (typical). ultimately if an object is not appearing correctly, we just change the object style instead of the user having to keep track of different families for different clients.

We do a lot of graphical control and object visibility control with sub-category object styles via View Templates.