Delete a Workset's Contents?

Ron Palma with ideate shared a rather unpleasant customer story the other day via their Solutions Blog. The circumstances seem to me a perfect storm of things that wouldn't normally happen...define normal though.

• The customer's project is using Worksets
• The customer reassigned the project and survey point elements to a different Workset (normally assigned to the default Workset1)
• The customer deleted the Workset they were assigned to
• Revit permits these elements to be deleted, when otherwise it would be impossible to do so.

What allowed for them to be deleted? Choosing the Deleted option in this dialog.

I'd never choose the Deleted option!!

Far better to choose the Moved to option and select the appropriate Workset. One other habit I have is to never rename Workset 1 because Revit won't let us delete it. It's the "original" workset and Revit just doesn't let us delete it. The survey/project base point elements are assigned to it when Worksets are enabled. Left alone the opportunity to delete them wouldn't have been possible. Oh, the reason I don't rename it is that it can be confusing later when someone decides to delete the renamed workset but can't. Easier to just leave it there as a "stray element shelf".

Revit does need to be a bit more curious when deleting a workset. It should scan the element types assigned to the workset for any that are technically not supposed to be be deleted.