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 question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

Not too long ago, a good customer contacted me about using Ideate Automation. Ideate Software has a simple process called the Ideate Forge Connector. The purpose of the Ideate Forge Connector custom integration is to use the Autodesk API to authenticate the user and to enable Ideate Automation to see and access hub names, project names, and Revit model names for which the user has the appropriate permissions. This custom integration ONLY gives Ideate Automation the current list of Revit models that can be used for Ideate Automation. It does NOT give Ideate Software access to any BIM360 or Autodesk Construction Cloud models. The access is needed for Ideate Software to be able to generate a list of available models.

However, we realize that firms are sensitive and protective of their data. This particular customer that reached out to me mentioned that they could NOT give access to Ideate Software even to generate the list of models that was on their BIM360 Hub.

Well, Ideate Automation 2.1 to the rescue! We realized the hesitancy and security concerns from some potential and existing customers, and we introduced the “Recent Revit Files” dropdown within Ideate Automation 2.1.

Within Ideate Automation 2.1, a new Manage option has been added for “Recent Revit Files.”  

While we continue to recommend the custom integration for an optimum file access experience, we developed this functionality to respond to customer requests to make it easier to work with Revit files from a partner’s Autodesk account/hubs. It also allows you to use Ideate Automation without giving Ideate Software the BIM 360/ACC access permissions required for the custom integration.

As long as the Ideate Automation user has previously accessed the Revit model on their computer, the list of Revit models will appear if the “Recent Revit Files” is the active setting under Manage on the main Ideate Automation dialog.

 
Here, you can see access to several Ideate Software BIM360 Hubs as well as the Recent Revit Files.

This also makes it MUCH easier to trial Ideate Automation since you don’t have to go through the custom integration to gain access to a model for testing or trialing purposes.

You can download a full function, 30-day Ideate Automation trial here. If you already have Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, IdeateApps, or Ideate StyleManager, the Ideate Automation trial will work seamlessly with your current Ideate Software applications. If you don’t have any Ideate Software applications, you can download those applications for a trial as well. Or, you can certainly use Ideate Automation as a stand-alone solution for publishing PDF or publishing DWG information as a few examples.

We made this update as a request from several Ideate Software customers, so be sure to continue to keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected] and we will keep answering them! 
 

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 23 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 question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

Here is a good question that came across our virtual desk.

“I was wondering if there is a way to number doors according to the ‘To Room’ number information, and following a sequence off 1, 2, 3, etc.; without the need to pick the doors or marking a path.”

There are several ways to accomplish this task very easily within Ideate ReNumber which is a tool within the IdeateApps collection.

The easiest step-by-step answer for the question asked by our customer is included in our “Getting Started” online Help topic for IdeateApps called Renumber Doors.

Within a default Revit Schedule View, you can modify the ‘From Room’ and ‘To Room’ values if those properties appear within your schedule.

Ideate ReNumber can easily modify those ‘From Room’ and ‘To Room’ properties on the fly within the renumbering process. You can also choose to report on the ‘From Room’ value instead of making the change within the Revit database.

Ideate ReNumber can be used to change the Revit values for the ‘To Room’ and ‘From Room’ properties whether you are using the Room Calculation Point property or not. (Door swing graphics will only change if you are using the Room Calculation Point property.) Once the doors are properly set to the correct room, future numbering tasks are a snap.

 
The Flip Room button will change the relationship within the Revit database and update the Door Mark value.   

If you just want to report on the ‘From Room’ value, this will push the value into the door Mark but NOT change the Revit database.

 
Ideate ReNumber will identify doors that are using the ‘Room Calculation Point’ property. When this property is active, the door swing graphics will update when changing the ‘To Room’ and ‘From Room’ flip button. If this property is not in use, the door swing graphics will not update.

You can use our delivered door rule to renumber doors based upon the room values.

Please review this very detailed 8-minute video on the features of door renumbering with Ideate ReNumber.

Additionally, you can renumber door instance marks via a Revit Schedule View by activating the Ideate ReNumber tool within an active Revit Schedule View.

When Ideate ReNumber is started from an active Revit Schedule View, the only available selection method will be Auto-Number by View.

This online help article is a detailed explanation for managing door numbering with Ideate ReNumber. 

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected] and we will keep answering them!

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 23 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 question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

Recently a customer reached out to us with a question about Ideate Explorer, which is his “favorite troubleshooting add-in to clear out warnings in a hot mess of a project.” 

After deleting one Warning Type that cleared out 10 warnings, he thought that he could clear more warnings faster if he could sort by the severity of the warnings as well as by the number of warnings on a specific element. 

“I just had deleted one object which cleared out 10 warnings, and it dawned on me that in particularly rough projects I could get more warnings cleared faster if I knew which items had multiple warnings. In an ideal world, that sorting by severity of issues could weight based on the errors most severe.   E.g., in our workflows I see a ton of abandoned room separation lines which cause notable room calc based lag, I might want those (or other red rated warning types) to count for 3 points, where I really may not care (from an emergent clean up standpoint) about a green warning about a railing being malformed, which might only get half a point.” 

By default, the Ideate Explorer Warnings tab is set to “Sort by:” the Types of Warnings, such as Highlighted Floors Overlap shown below.

Ideate Explorer Warnings Tab set to Sort by: Warning Types

We responded to this customer that you can also change the “Sort by:” criteria to Elements rather than the Types of Warnings. This will show the Element ID and the number of warnings assigned to that specific element. It will also show all the different Types of Warnings assigned to that element in the Element Information Pane.  

In the example below, the Sweep, the Sunshade, and Mike’s Roof all have 48 warnings of the same Type. However, the Storefront has 2 warnings of 2 different Types. You can also see the severity of the Warning Type by color in the Element Information Pane. In the example below, we have a severity of medium for the walls overlapping and a severity of low for the walls missing their target.

Ideate Explorer Warnings Tab set to Sort by: Elements

”BINGO!” said the customer, who was able to fix 30 warnings from one element very easily.

You can learn more about the Warnings Manager in Ideate Explorer by reviewing this online Help topic. You can also review an entire library of videos focusing on using the Ideate Explorer Warnings Manager. 

Don’t let your project become a hot mess! Fix things easily with Ideate Explorer and the Ideate Warnings Manager!

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected]. Your feedback allows us to improve our software with every release.

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 question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

It seems like we’ve received a fair number of support cases recently around this strange warning message concerning Ideate Sticky. So, I wanted to explain it in detail and offer a quick fix.

Unexpected future version?  What’s going on here?

Ideate Sticky customers might see this message when someone on the project team has upgraded to the latest version of Ideate Sticky and the rest of the team has not. When that specific person updated the stickies in the project with their latest Ideate Sticky version, this upgraded the settings format, causing the warning to show up for everyone on an older release. When the person with the latest release of Ideate Sticky opens another project and updates the stickies, the warning will start to show up there as well.

The solution is to update everyone to the latest release.

The reason this change was made in the latest release is the display scaling calculation. You can read more about that specific setting in this blog article.

The EASIEST and fastest way to update the whole office to the latest release of Ideate Sticky or the entire software bundle is to use our Ideate Software Installer. I mentioned it recently within this blog post ensuring you have the latest release of IdeateApps.

 
 
The Ideate Software Installer is the best way to update all your Ideate Software tools in a snap!

Now that you know about the Ideate Software installer, I hope the road ahead is smooth sailing! Wait, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected]. We are always happy to assist our customers with their Ideate Software solutions.

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 question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

We recently were contacted by a customer that was trying to find empty Structural Framing Tags. Some of the tags were displaying correctly and some had the infamous question mark symbol (?) within the tag. They were trying to find those empty framing tags and delete them. While investigating, we utilized the Query function within Ideate Explorer and searched for the parameter “Tag Text” to be able to list all the tags that had a prefix and a suffix in this project. That’s when we realized the specific framing tag had a prefix and a suffix setup within the tag.

The prefix and suffix within that Structural Framing Tag was telling Revit that it had a value and it was not actually blank, although the tag wasn’t set to display the prefix or suffix. In this instance, the prefix was set to “T=” and suffix was set to “k”. So, we suggested using Ideate Explorer or Ideate QuickSelect to search for the non-displayed prefix and suffix because you can now also search on the “Tag Text” property. In this specific case, we were able to tell the customer to use either Ideate Explorer or Ideate QuickSelect to use the search string “T=k” to find the Structural Framing Tags that need to be deleted.

Use the Search field in either Ideate Explorer or Ideate QuickSelect to find information displaying within a tag. This is the Tag Text Parameter.

Ideate Explorer, in addition to the text displayed in the Results area, also searches within the tag text parameter value, which is not displayed but can be viewed within Ideate Query.   

Using Ideate Query within Ideate Explorer allows you to find all the Tag Text information.

Ideate QuickSelect also has the advanced search for text within the Tag Text parameter, but it does not have the additional power of Ideate Query to see additional details of the Tag Text.

You can learn more about Ideate Explorer Search by reviewing this online Help topic.

You can learn more about Ideate QuickSelect Search by reviewing this online Help topic.
 

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected], because this is critically important feedback allows us to continue to improve our software every release.