September 30, 2009

Revit Rant #2

The project on which I am working has a Model Group for a pair of patient rooms, which is then repeated multiple times on two floors.

When making changes to the Model Group, you enter a special mode. When the edits are done, you "Finish", and the edits are propogated to each instance of the Model Group. When it works, it is really great, and most of the time it works.

Today, I ran into a problem that I had encountered previously. There is another team member working on the project, and when I tried to save the changes I made to the Model Group, I got an error message stating that the other person had possession of an element that needed to change as part of my Model Group save. The error message indicated that the other person needed to Save to Central, and then I needed to Reload Latest.

Getting the other person to Save to Central was no problem, since we sit in adjacent cubicles. Unfortunately, the Reload Latest function is disabled when editing a Model Group, so I still can not save the Model Group changes! That in itself is infuriating (I just love redoing work), but to have the error message tell me to do something that can not be done is simply rubbing salt in the wound.

So, you need to strike a balance between saving Model Group changes so often that you waste too much time waiting for the save to occur and doing so much work in a Model Group edit session that, should you be unable to save because you can not Reload Latest, you lose too much time discarding and redoing the edits.

1 comment:

Paul F. Aubin said...

There is actually a way to save the group off to separate file (like Wblocking in Acad). While it would not solve your current problem, perhaps in the future it would help to work externanlly first and then reload the Group to update. You would still get the workset errors if someone else were working, but at least you could save the external group file until the central file was ready. Just a thought.

Also, try copy and paste to "temporarily" save the changes to another file.