Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world. You can review some of these recent questions and answers via our Ideate Software Support Series blog category.

We always strive to make our user interface more intuitive and easier to understand for all our Revit solutions.  A few years ago, we did a major user interface update to Ideate BIMLink. Please review this blog article for another post about the Ideate BIMLink user interface.

Ideate BIMLink was designed to extract Revit data and send it to Microsoft Excel for editing or review. A customer recently asked us if Ideate BIMLink has the ability to apply some minor changes to the Revit model without the need to send the information to Excel and then import those changes back into the model.

You may not be aware, but this “inline editing” ability has been available within the Ideate BIMLink user interface for several years. Did you know that you can edit any parameter data from within the Ideate BIMLink Preview Dialog? The Preview Dialog’s white cells are editable. Even the drop-down selections are available for editing. When you select OK on the lower right of the dialog, any changes that have been made on the Preview Dialog are saved back into the Revit database. We wouldn’t suggest this for large editing workflows, but it’s perfect for our quality control (QC-) links, where the items are filtered and sorted to help find the ‘wrong’ items. In the example below, we can quickly see that a few of the device elevations are wrong and make the edit directly inside of Ideate BIMLink without the need to export to Excel.

The Preview Dialog allows editing of any cells that are a white background. You can type relevant information or use a drop-down selection if that is available.

Another Ideate BIMLink user interface tip also involves the Ideate BIMLink Preview Dialog. Did you know that a small triangle in the column header is an indication that the specific parameter is being used as sort criteria? You can easily review which parameters are being used as the sort criteria without having to open the Sort tab.  The Preview Dialog will also show you which column or columns have been set to the data key by shading the column header in a turquoise blue color.

 The Preview Dialog column headers will show a small triangle if that specific parameter is involved within the sort criteria settings.

The Preview Dialog column headers will show a shaded blue turquoise color if that specific parameter has been set as the data key.

You may have a secret Valentine’s for February 14th, but we certainly don’t want the power and ease of Ideate BIMLink to be a secret!

Always make sure you have the latest Ideate Software updates! You can review the latest on our website and easily download the latest versions.

If you have any comments on how we can improve our user interfaces, please let us know! Just send an email to [email protected].

This post is part of a series of real questions posed to our Support team and our solutions. View more. 

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About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world. You can review some of these recent questions and answers via our Ideate Software Support Series blog category.

We always strive to make our user interface more intuitive and easier to understand for all our Revit solutions.  A few years ago, we did a major user interface update to Ideate BIMLink.

One of our longtime customers recently contacted us about the ability to load an existing link definition, as it used to be available on the primary Ideate BIMLink dialog as a pull-down option. In order to streamline the creation of NEW Ideate BIMLink link definitions, we moved the ability to load links under the NEW button.  Once you select on NEW, you have the option to:

• Create a new link by browsing our library of hundreds of delivered link definitions
• Create a new link definition from scratch by using category
• Create a new link definition from an existing Revit schedule within the project
• Create a new link by loading an existing link definition (This button appears under the browse method for creating new links.)

You can find more information about loading link definitions via this Ideate BIMLink Help article.

The Load of a previously saved Ideate BIMLink definition is available under the Browse method for creating NEW Ideate BIMLink link definitions.

Always make sure you have the latest Ideate Software updates! You can review the latest on our website and easily download the latest versions.

If you have any comments on how we can improve our user interfaces, please let us know! Just send an email to [email protected].

Until next time, happy loading of your Ideate BIMLink data!

This post is part of a series of real questions posed to our Support team and our solutions. View more. 

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About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world. You can review some of these recent questions and answers via our Ideate Software Support Series blog category.

Lately we’ve found that many of our customers are dedicating time and effort towards managing their Revit model health metrics, and specifically Revit warnings data via Ideate Explorer. In order to gather consistent and more importantly, relevant warnings data, the first step is to decide which Revit warnings are important, and then assign an appropriate warnings ranking as shown below.

Did you know that you can sort by the column headers such as Warning Category, Type or Rank? This can be quite useful to review which Revit Warnings are important to your company.  Just click on the column header to sort.

You can learn how to both setup and deploy company standards that relate to this important model health metric within our online help topic: Deploying Warning Standards. This time of year, it’s JOY TO THE WORLD.......or maybe it should be DEPLOY TO THE WORLD.

This post is part of a series of real questions posed to our Support team and our solutions. View more. 

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About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

We’ve had several recent inquiries about Ideate Software tools and a recent Log4Shell vulnerability issue that’s been in the news.

We’re pleased to let everyone know that Ideate Software applications are written in C# and we do not use Java at all. Therefore, the Log4j library is not used anywhere in our software and our customers are not impacted by this issue.

About the Log4Shell Vulnerability

Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) is a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability was publicly disclosed on 9 December 2021. The vulnerability takes advantage of Log4j, allowing attackers to execute arbitrary Java code on a server or other computer and possibly leak sensitive information.

Questions?

Reach out to our Support team. We are here to help.
 

 

Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world.

Recently, we received several inquiries regarding Type Swapping some old Revit families with newer, updated families that have some of the same parameter data. The issue that customers reported was that when they Type Swapped some of their families with the new ones, some Parameter data from the old families did not transfer to the swapped families. Users then had to go back and edit the data manually for the new families so they resembled the original families. In a situation such as this one, users could end up spending hours, if not days, chasing down all the families that were reset to the default parameter values.

As it turns out, this is a common issue with Revit Families that use family-based instance parameters. An example would be the break line detail component family that has multiple instance-based family parameters that control the width, depth and the size of the jag that breaks and masks details and views. When users place these break lines in their views, they manually adjust the default instance parameters to control is size so that they look appropriate for the detail or view that they are masking.

If you find yourself dealing with this situation, you should consider using Ideate BIMLink to Type Swap families and map your Parameter values to the newly swapped Families.

Let’s consider this example, which is typical:

We have a series of details using the out-of-the-box break line detail component, which is dated by today’s standards, as shown here:

The goal is to Type Swap these detail components with a newer break line that has a more appropriate jag and a heavier line weight. For the new detail component, the parameters that control the length, depth and jag are the same. When we manually select the original break lines in our detail and swap them out for the new detail component, this ends up being the result:

Although the Parameters are the same, the values that control the size of the break line did not transfer over to the new detail components. Imagine having swapped out one hundred of these detail components? If you were not paying attention to the change, you would have to go back and manually adjust each one of them. That would be very time consuming.

To use Ideate BIMLink for successful Type Swapping and mapping of the original parameter data to the new families, simply start with one of our pre-defined links that allows Type Swapping, or you can create your own from scratch, such as this one:

In this case, I created a new link for Detail Components and filtered the data so only Break Lines would export to Excel. I added the necessary Parameters that define the shape of the break line, such as the left and right-side lengths, and the size of the jag. Once the link was set up, I exported the data to Excel.

Once the data was exported to Excel, I swapped the Break Line detail component for the Break Line-Better detail component, as shown above. I left the values in columns C-F the same since the size of the detail components need to remain the same. Once the families are swapped, you can import the changes, as seen here:

You can see from the preview that the detail components have swapped out but the values for the left, right and jags have become read-only. This is because those family-based instance parameters have been reset to the original values that are defined in the family that was loaded up. This process is no different than manually selecting these family in Revit and swapping them out to the new family. The good news here is that your last Excel export has the families swapped out and retained the values for the left, right and the jag. All you need to do now is re-import the same Excel file again and this will reset the values to the ones you want, as seen here:

Once you click Import, the newly swapped detail components will be set to match the values of the original ones that were exported out.

 

Using Ideate BIMLink, we can easily swap Families by Type Swapping them in Excel, and then reimport the same Excel file again to set the instance-based Family parameters back to the way they were before you did the Type Swapping. This simple two-step process will save you a ton of time and the hassle of manually resetting the family parameters back to the way they were before you did the Type Swapping.

Browse our website for more information on our Revit productivity tools. Give them a try with a free trial version or subscribe today. 

View more posts in our Support Series.

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About the Author

Sash Kazeminejad - AIA, LEED AP - Customer Success Manager
Sash earned his Master of Architecture from Montana State University and is a California registered architect, LEED Accredited Professional. He has extensive experience in project management; BIM management; design for architectural firms in California, Montana, and Oregon; and leading classroom and online BIM training. He provides consulting, sales, support, and training solutions to AECO customers around the globe. Find Sash on LinkedIn.