My favorite new feature in Revit 2013 is the ability to persistently control views through the use of View Templates. In earlier versions of Revit there was a "Default View Template" field which didn't do a whole lot. Sure, you could grab a whole bunch of views through the Project Browser and manually force them to update per your View Template rules, but who has time to remember?
Ideate BIMLink exposes this data and lets you extract information from the host object that the rebar is placed in, thus allowing you to create a schedule that contains both rebar information as well as information about the elements it is placed in. Creating such a schedule using Ideate BIMLink is easy:
1. Launch IdeateBIMLink from the Add-Ins tab
2. Create a New Link with Structural Rebar as the category
3. In the Properties dialog box, notice how you can add data about the objects that the rebar is hosted in.
You can export this data to Microsoft Excel, Edit it if need be and bring it back into the Revit Model.
This post was originally published on the Ideate Solutions Blog 11.12.2012