Filtering Global Parameter Associations in Revit

Global parameters allow you to introduce many new constraints and dynamic ways to manage your model.  This gives us more power, but makes it harder to understand what is driving changes to the model - so Autodesk have given us a suite of tools to track where global parameters have been implemented.  Amongst these tools are additional filtering capabilities.

One of the features introduced in Revit 2017 was the ability to filter elements by Global Parameter Associations (this is not available in Revit 2016 R2).  There are two ways to do this:

• in schedules - clearly explained in the help files, but has significant limitations
• View filters - this is not well documented in the help files, but is very powerful and extremely useful

Filter Schedule by Associated Global Parameters

You can filter a schedule by parameters that have GP associations – a new ‘is associated with’ filter method is available. This should be invaluable for tracking down all those associations that are making unexpected changes to your model

Unfortunately you cannot filter a schedule associated with more than one global parameter – well, you can but it would always force a blank list in the schedule because Revit only allows the operator ‘And’ within schedules (it is not possible for one element to be associated with more than one global parameter).

Until we have an ‘Or’ operator in schedule filters, this is a singularly useless capability unless you are working with only one global parameter!

There is also an option to filter by ‘is not associated with’ – this does allow you to add multiple parameters because excluding by several associations works with the ‘And’ operator. This is somewhat more useful in that it does work, but you are less likely to want to do this.

Filter Views by Associated Global Parameters

View filters also now work with properties that have GP associations – a new ‘is associated with’ filter method is available. This allows you to visually highlight elements by different associations. This suffers from the same problem as schedules, in that filters can only have the ‘And’ operator, meaning you can only filter by one parameter at a time.  However, there is a big difference in that you can add multiple filters per view; you can then make each filter work differently (on/off, or different hatching or colours) – making this very useful, and much more effective than scheduling by association.  It will of course give you a visual result rather than a schedule