Revit Type Catalogs

This article comes from my Revit Basics Blog which I have decided to shut down. 

When you have a family that has a lot of options, using a Type Catalog may be the best choice for helping users navigate those options. An obvious example is structural steel. In that case there are many different choices and each choice change the shape, wiegth and identity of the family. Type catalogs use lookup table to look up the appropriate data needed for the different available types.

For this example a dishwasher family is created and it is named dishwasher.rfa.

Select the Family Types button to identify the parameters to associate with the look up table. For this example use Model and Manufacturer. In order for this to work correctly some data has to be placed in Value column. The words model and manufacturer will work, the letter X or any other characters will work as well, just don't leave them blank.

Next a look up table needs to be created. I start with an Excel file that will be converted to a TXT file. Save this file with the same exact name as the family. Only the file extension should be different.

Leave cell A1 blank. Revit reconizes this as a heading for Family type which will start below it. Placing any data here will cause things not to work. Fill out the rest of the cells as indicated below.

Column A defines the family Types that can be created.

Column B defines the Model number assigned to that type.

Column C defines the Manufacturer assigned to that type.

The column headers for Model and Manufacturer are a combination of the parameter name to be controlled and a code for the parameter type. The codes are listed below. 

• Angle                    ##ANGLE##DEGREES
• Area                     ##AREA##SQUARE_FEET
• Currency               ##CURRENCY##
• Integer                 ##OTHER##
• Length                  ##LENGTH##FEET
• Material                ##OTHER##
• Number                ##OTHER##
• Slope                    ##SLOPE##SLOPE_DEGREES
• Text                     ##OTHER##
• Volume                 ##VOLUME##CUBIC_FEET
• *Yes/No                ##OTHER##

 *When using a Yes/No parameter the Yes=1 and No=0.

When done, save this Excel file with a CSV file type.

Then change it's exrension in Windows Explorer to ".txt".

Test this by loading the dishwasher family into a new project.