Revit 2011: Reporting Parameters

2011 is here! As I post, I'm participating in Autodesk AEC's blogger day event. Much like David Light, I've had to sit on most of this information for 9 months+ now (and its been soooo hard!), I can also say that I expect to see more! Maybe not tomorrow, not even next month, but soon!

There are a growing number of posts in general about the new features in 2011, so I decided to focus on something near and dear to my heart (supposedly my case-study provided good reasons to move forward with this feature) Reporting Parameters.

Reporting Parameters are a hugely powerful feature (as mentioned by other posters). So I thought that I would do some movies to demo how they work, and what they do. I've got four movies lined up, each builds on the next in complication.

First, the basics. Creating a reporting parameter, and showing what it can do. Note, a reporting parameter does not have to be shared, but combining reporting parameters with shared parameters, means you can get that information into a schedule (or tag).



Next up, a little bit of what you can and can't do with a reporting parameter in a family. For instance you can use dimensions from "Host Geometry" to drive elements in families. However, reporting parameters driven by non-host geometry can only report the information, you can't use the value in a formula. Note, you also cannot directly drive geometry with a reporting parameter, you should set another parameter equal to the Reporting parameter in the formula column.



Third a creative application of the reporting parameter in Curtain Panel. Note that when a curtain panel is loaded into a project you can already schedule Width & Height, so if you create reporting parameters to do the same thing you should probably name them differently (particularly if they're shared).



Are the idea juices cooking yet? Here is one more example, also making use of the new "Adaptive Component". Note that these components can only be placed in a Conceptual Mass family (think of the mass family as a "wrapper" but you can change the category of the Adaptive Component, as well as linking parameters and geometry, to give the user in project full control of the Adaptive component (within reason, there are still some limitations).