In this Click Saver I want to talk about a little unknown issue with Shared Parameters, Families, and Templates. Shared Parameters and Family Parameters have the ability to be sorted under Group Parameters so it is easier to find the data in the Properties tool. What isn’t well known is the issue that arises if you would like to change the Group Parameter category, after the fact, with Shared Parameters compared to Family Parameters. I haven’t seen this issue get brought before and wanted to make sure that when you run into it how to fix it, if someone has a better way to fix please let me know.
To put things in context I had a client working with shared parameters and placing them into their families for tags and schedules for their projects. To compound this issue they had placed a lot of the common families into their Template along with their Tags, Schedules, and Sheets so everything is setup for the staff which is something that I believe is a “best practice process/workflow”. Everything was going great until they decided to change where they wanted the Shared Parameter to be sorted in the Group Parameter category in the Properties tool.
With a Family Parameter you can simply go back to the family, change the Object Parameter category, save it, load into project, and overwrite the existing family to see the new changes. If you try and do the same thing with Shared Parameters you will not see it update when you load into project and overwrite the existing family. Even if you delete all of the families in the project or template that are using that particular Shared Parameter, nothing will be fixed when you reload the family. So something behind the scenes in the project or template it has captured this information and is storing it in some sort of invisible place holder, which causes the issue of not letting us change it in the normal way like Family Parameters.
The way that I found to fix this issue is getting back into the project or template and creating a Project Parameter. Now initially this might not sound like a great fix because the Project Parameter will be attached to every family that falls under the Categories that you check mark. That is very true, but this is what causes the invisible place holder that I mentioned earlier to finally update to the correct Object Parameter category. Once you have created it now pick on one of the families and look in the Properties tool and you will see that the Object Parameter is fixed.
So how do you fix the issue with the Project Parameter being attached to all of the families that are on the checked marked categories? What I have found is that if you go back into the Project Parameter tool, select your newly created Parameters and use the Remove tool that the Shared Parameters stay in the corrected Object Parameter category.
Like I said before if someone knows a different trick to get to the invisible place holder I’m all ears, for myself and clients this seems to work great and gets the job done. Hopefully in a future release the Shared Parameters will update like their cousins the Family Parameters but until then I hope this saves you a few picks and clicks.
See you in class, Jarod
