Weird Stair Stuff - part 4 - Stair Subcategory Overrides

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Subcategories (again)

The last couple of posts have been about stair and railing subcategories, which changed in v2013.
I was recently asked two questions about how to override the display of parts of stair.  After my success in finding a workaround with railing overrides, I thought it should be possible to do something similar with stairs, particularly as they are now made of separate components (runs, supports and landings), and have more subcategories . . . .

Visibility Graphics

In the Visibility Graphics dialog box, sadly stair subcategories do not allow individual overrides (except for visibility and lines) - it is the whole stair or nothing [the greyed out boxes in the dialog screen snapshot below are not editable].  Transparency, surface patterns & halftone would all be extremely useful for all or any of the subcategories.

Visibility Graphics Stair Subcategories

View Filters

If at first you do not succeed, try a different tack: 
After encountering a similar limitation on railing subcategories, I tried creating a view filter, which worked for the particular railing subcategory I wanted (although filters are not available for all).
Unfortunately, view filters do not work for any stair subcategory - they just do not show up in the list.  So it is just the stair category - all or nothing again.

Strangely enough there seem to be numerous stair parameters to choose from if you do want to filter the whole stair.  But if you study that list, you'll see that it is only overall stair parameters, and not any of the really useful things, which are properties of a run or landing like "Actual Width", "Monolithic Material", "Tread Material".  So in fact that list of parameters that you can filter by is pretty limiting.

We are running out of options here - its getting desperate:

Override By Element

• Override By Element works on the whole stair
• Override By Element does not work on individually selected components such as Support, Run or Landing (it is greyed out when you right-click on an individual stair component).

So that didn't get us anywhere useful.

Linework Tool

What is the second last solution to over-riding things in a view?  The 'Linework Tool'.  Well, that works but it is pretty tedious to work with, and quite clunky - as stairs are system families, you cannot even tab-select multiple lines or the whole component, so it is line by line.

So, first do a temporary transparency override on the whole stair, then use the linework tool to make each riser and tread line dashed:

Then reset the override to remove the transparency - and the tread/riser lines show dashed beyond the support (stringer):

That would have been so much better if we had overrides or filters on subcategories.  Although, having said that, we have the problem that in section/elevation the risers and treads are not distinguished by subcategory - they are all the same (Treads/Riser), which is again very limiting.

Last Resort

What is the last solution to overrides in a view?  Detail lines and masking regions - but we won't even go there because it is absolutely forbidden as far as I am concerned!

In my next post I will talk about the other stair subcategory workaround I had to come up with - and maybe with slightly better results.  But it is a seriously weird workaround.

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