Creating Project Parameters in Revit

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Creating Project Parameters in Revit.

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Project parameters hold information used only within one project.

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They are hosted by elements in that project.

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And these can be displayed in schedules, but not in tags.

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Typically, use a project parameter when the information is only needed within the current project.

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If you need to share it with other projects, then shared parameters are a better solution.

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So let's jump into Revit to see how this works.

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So here we are in Revit 2024.

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And let's open up our small medical center parameters file.

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It opens up in the ground floor plan.

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But let's switch to our default 3D view, so you'll understand better what we're trying to do here.

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So this medical center basically has two functions.

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One is for urgent care, and the other one is the health center.

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Back in our ground floor, the urgent care sector is to the left,

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and the health center resides in the right part of the building.

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So we want to differentiate for each room what building sector it belongs to.

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And this is not a typical requirement.

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Therefore, it is an ideal candidate for a project parameter.

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So in my Manage tab, I click on "Project Parameters".

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And you'll see that we currently have no project parameters because this list is empty.

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I want to create a new parameter.

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So I click on the "New Parameter" icon.

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This is the dialog box we looked at earlier.

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And you notice once again that the project parameter can appear in schedules, but not in tags.

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So let's create a project parameter.

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And let's call this one "Building Sector".

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And it is an instance parameter, which means that each room that we apply this to can belong to different building sectors.

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The discipline is common because it can belong to multiple disciplines.

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The data type will be text, and we want to group this parameter under Identity Data.

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Last thing we need to do is to tell it what category this belongs to.

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First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that it's only set to Architecture to make this list a bit shorter,

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and we're going to search for Rooms.

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So I click on Rooms.

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So what this means now is that each room will have the additional parameter of Building Sector.

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So I click OK.

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And now when I select a room in my Properties, you will notice under Identity Data, I have a Building Sector.

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I'm going to type in Urgent Care, and you notice the little tooltip that says No Matches.

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This means that this is the first entry that I put in.

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And it can't find any match for this particular Building Sector, which is fine because it's the first one we entered.

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Select another room, the X-Ray.

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And now in the Building Sector, I have a dropdown list, and notice that it says Urgent Care.

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When I come over to my Health Center, and I click one of these exam rooms, I now need to type in Health Center.

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Again, the tooltip says No Matches.

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And once again, if I select another exam room, now in my dropdown, I have both my Health Center or my Urgent Care.

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Now, I could go around and select all these different rooms individually.

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But a better way of doing that is simply selecting this entire wing, for the Health Center.

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With all these selected, I need to filter them.

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So I want to check None, and only select the Rooms.

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I have 28 rooms selected.

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So I can simply come down to Building Sector, and assign Health Center for this.

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I'm going to repeat the process, for the left-hand side.

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Once again, filter only for the Rooms.

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And then notice that the Building Sector is currently set to Varies because some of these rooms were already assigned to the Health Center.

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So I'm going to set this to Urgent Care.

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Now, remember that project parameters can be used in schedules.

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So let's open up the room schedule.

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Notice the room schedule is divided into levels, and there's all sorts of fields here,

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which are another word for parameters,

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but the Building Sector isn't part of the schedule.

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So let's add that.

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I go to my Fields to edit them.

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And here I find my Building Sector.

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I want to have that go below my Room Styles, and I click on Add, and click OK.

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Let me pan over a little bit.

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Now you notice for my Lower Level, one of these actually belongs to Health Center, and that doesn't seem quite right.

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So I know that this one actually belongs to Urgent Care.

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So another nice thing about this is in my schedules, I can change these parameters.

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On my Ground Floor level, I have some of these that are set to Health Center, some of them set to Urgent Care,

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and that doesn't seem to make much sense either.

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What I can do is I can select this particular row, and I can highlight this in my model.

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Now Revit is telling me that there's other views where this is available from, but this is good enough.

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Simply going to close out of this.

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This is my staff restroom.

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I can pan out to see exactly where it belongs. So no, in this case, this belongs to my Health Center.

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If I go back to my room schedule, note that the nurse station, the stairs, is basically the same.

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So I can select both of these and change them over to the Health Center.

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If I scroll down to the second level, you notice that none of these are yet assigned to the Health Center.

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So I can select one row, as I did before, highlight it in the model, there is no open views.

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So it's going to search for a proper open view, and I'm going to close this because this is the proper view that I need.

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And as before, I'm just simply going to select all the rooms through my filter,

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and select Health Center, for the Building Sector.

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Go back to my room schedule, and notice that everything is now properly assigned.

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So to summarize, project parameters are quite useful when there's a unique requirement only for one particular project.

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If you have parameters required for multiple projects, then your best bet is to use a shared parameter, which we'll be looking at next.