Switch on and off elements and invisible text

In one of our projects we had some ‘owner furnished contractor installed’ (OFCI) equipments. We didn't want to show these elements in our contract drawings, but also wanted the ability to show them for client meetings, etc. The building is more than 10 floors, and there were 100s of such equipments strewn around.

The best way to achieve this would be to create a separate workset for these equipments, and when you switch off the workset (File menu > Worksets) these elements, along with their tags, get turned off.

The problem is our project was not setup this way. Even though we placed all the objects in a new workset, the tags didn't get turned off, because they were not really tags but dumb texts!!  Text objects belong to the view workset and so, could not be placed in the newly created workset.

So, we were looking for a workaround. One solution was to create a new text style with almost white color (254, 254, 254) and no leader.

We assigned all the texts related to these OFCI equipment to this text style to switch them off!  We have to just redefine the text style to make them visible again.

It still would have been better if we were aware of this requirement while setting up the project!

Instance grips stop working

When you are working on a big project, once in a while, Revit gets tired off doing all the calculations, all the coordination and shows its anger on simple families that have instance parameter grips.

For eg., here is a very simple extrusion family with an instance grip.

Pulling the grip after working on the project for some time would not change the geometry of the family. If you go to the properties of the family and change it’s instance value, it works fine.

But still, one cannot pull the grips to modify.

However, if you use the align

command to extend (change) the geometry, the grips become alive again!

I don't know why this happens.

Vista file deletion problem

I had written about a vista file deletion problem some time back. Vista would not allow a certain file to be renamed / deleted / moved. This happened to mostly DWG and RVT files that are more than 3 years old.

The happy news is that if you installed the web update 1 for the Revit 2010 versions, this problem should go away. If you still have this problem, please file a support request with Autodesk.