Weird Revit Stair Stuff - Stairs in Groups

Go to Revit Stair & Railings Index Page

No matter how much stuff I post on this blog about stairs and railings in Revit, I keep finding new weird things to report.  The latest one is to do with groups that contain the (not so) new component based stairs, and the element selection process.

Group Selection

If you select a group (by single click) that contains a stair, the stair does not highlight while the rest of the group does (including the railings hosted on the stairs).

  

Isolate Element

If you then use the "Temporary Isolate Element" command, Revit will hide everything except what you have selected - in this case the stair is not displayed.  This could be confusing at the very least, but extremely annoying if you need to edit the group and work on the stair.

Group & Stair Selection

If you reset the temporary hide/isolate, then select the group (by single click) and the stair (tab/ctrl click), the stair does highlight with the rest of the group;  it also displays an icon to allow you to exclude the stair from the group

Then use the "Isolate Element" command again, this time Revit displays the group including the stair - which it should have done in the first place.  You can now proceed with editing the group (or whatever you needed to do).

Group & Run Selection

Just as an experiment, reset the temporary isolate;  try selecting the group and then just one run in the stair.  This time the run does not highlight - another inconsistency.  You can check that it is selected because the "exclude group member" icon is displayed, and Stairs:Run is listed in the selection filter.

When you use the Temporary Isolate Element command again, the stair run is not displayed - yet another inconsistency.

Summary

This may seem trivial, and it is possible to work around it - but I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if a stair was or was not part of a group.  It was made more complicated because the group was part of a multistorey core, and the stairs from the floors above and below were easily selectable so I had to be careful that I selected the correct instance of the stair to match the selected instance of the group.
All this weird, inconsistent behaviour does not make it easy to learn or use Revit.

Go to Revit Stair & Railings Index Page