Worksharing Display Modes and Other Handy Tips for Revit 2012

Given the current significance of BIM now seems as good a time as any to offer a few tips on the new features in the 2012 release of Autodesk's flagship BIM solution, Revit Architecture.

Revit Architecture has been one of the leading BIM solutions since the early days of BIM and, despite some initial hesitantcy within the industry, Autodesk bought into the market in 2002 and have continued to push ahead with its development, offering a great package for those ready to switch over from a CAD to a BIM workflow.

Revit 2012 Worksharing Display Modes

Revit 2012 introduces the new Worksharing Display Modes to visually distinguish project elements that are workshared.
Once you enable worksharing, you can modify the Worksharing Display Settings:

All worksets in the project and all usernames that have been involved in the project should appear in the Worksets and Owners tabs respectively.


For Worksets:
Simply create the desired worksets through the standard Worksets dialogue.  These will automatically appear in the Worksharing Display Settings > Worksets list.

For Owners:
You can easily add usernames to the project by opening the central file > Options > entering a new username > OK > Synchronize project.  You can repeat this action to populate a project with predefined Owners and assign them a colour too.


Transfer Project Standards

Once you have populated a project with your desired worksets, owners and colours you can automatically transfer the majority of this data over to another project.  Go to Manage > Transfer Project Standards and you'll find there is a new option for Worksharing Display Settings. Be aware that this process will not transfer workset names from project to project, although it will transfer the assigned colour (so it's not just a gimmick but a genuinely helpful extra after all!).
In short, the following Worksharing Display Settings will carry over when you transfer project standards between two worksharing enabled projects:
•    Checkout Status > Colour
•    Owners > Username
•    Owners > Colour
•    Model Updates > Colour
•    Worksets > Colour (If both projects contain the same named workset)
On a side note, if you were to transfer project standards from a worksharing project into a non-worksharing project, everything bar the Worksets > Colour setting will transfer over (since the worksets are not enabled yet). The other settings will then be available once you have enabled worksets in the project.
Quite a handy tip if you wish to predefine a username colour before worksets are enabled.

Journal files

Our third tip concerns the relocation of Journal files within Revit (a byproduct of making Revit Citrix-ready for 2012).

Revit now stores journal files in a user-specific location instead of a machine-specific one. By default, journal files reside in the following location:
•    Windows XP: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\Revit\<product name and release>\Journals
•    Windows Vista or Windows 7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Autodesk\Revit\<product name and release>\Journals

The Journal folder is hidden by default in Windows.

To make gathering Journal files a little easier, Harlon Brumm (of the Revit Clinic) has written a little Vbscript called Journal File Gather that copies them to another location from the user directory.  It also works for versions dating back to 2008 (using the old journal file location) and lets you pick the location to copy them to if you want to (the default is c:\Journals, but you can change this).

UserDataCache and Revit.ini

Ever the helpful type, Harlon provides the next section which guides you through the changes to UserDataCache and the Revit.ini file...

"The active revit.ini file is no longer located in the Program files directory. A number of files have been relocated to a new UserDataCache subfolder in the Program directory (C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit Architecture 2012\Program\UserDataCache). These files are "template" files and are copied into the user data "roaming" folder on the first launch of Revit, for every user. From then on, these files will be loaded from and saved to the user data "roaming" folder. Revit.ini can be customised and pushed to users by an Administrator by editing or replacing the copy in the UserDataCache folder prior to the users launching Revit for the first time.

If you need to change the Revit.ini for all users on a machine after users have launched Revit for the first time, you can do this by making a specific change to the Revit.ini file in the UserDataCache folder plus whatever other changes you want to make.

The Revit.ini file now contains lines like:
InstallGUID={B7D5E866-E7EA-44A8-81F5-67B1D397EC83}
ReInstallGUID={0E46A091-BFE2-455A-8617-B983C73A0F21}

Revit uses the numbers (GUIDs) after the equal sign to compare the Revit.ini file in the UserDataCache folder with the file in the Users directory (on my Windows 7 Machine its C:\Users\Harlan\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012)

If the GUIDs match, Revit does nothing - however, if they don't match (you change the GUID in the UserDataCache folder) then Revit will automatically replace the copy in the user's folder with the copy in UserDataCache.  This is a way you can push Revit.ini changes to users after they have launched Revit.  I will leave the GUID part up to you.

A special note:  Using this GUID trick will reset Revit UI and everything back to "out of the box" (QAT, Ribbon, etc back to default).  The GUID change will also re-write the entire ini file, not just the parts you changed.  Be careful! A special thanks to Jason Grant for pointing this out!"

Content taken from Revit Clinic

For more information on any part of the Revit family, give us a call on 03332 409 306 or email CAD@Jigsaw24.com. You can view the rest of our CAD, AEC and BIM solutions (and other exciting initialisms) on the JigsawCAD webpage.