Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Remember the Active Workset

What is the purpose of the Active Workset setting? You see it in the Workset panel, the Workset Dialog or on the Status Bar.


When you add elements to your project they are assigned to the Active Workset. Referring back to the Public Library as a metaphor for worksets, the active workset is the book shelf you are standing in front of as you prepare to put books away. You need to go to the non-fiction section before putting any non-fiction books away. If you put a fiction book on the non-fiction book shelf people will have a hard time finding it later. In Revit elements don't go anywhere when you assign them to the wrong workset but it does make it harder to open or close a workset if things aren't assigned properly.

As it happens there is an equivalent concept in AutoCAD, it's the notion of Current Layer and the Current Layer selection tool on the ribbon. In the same way, if you don't change your current layer in AutoCAD before sketching lines you'll end up with them assigned to the wrong layer. There is a significant difference however. In AutoCAD you are probably used to this Current Layer display changing to show the layer of a selected element. Revit's Active Workset display does NOT do this. This means you can't reassign the Workset parameter here. You can only do that in the Properties Palette.

Active Workset is your nemesis.

Much the same way Current Layer has been in the past. Remember to set your Active Workset.

Btw, I wrote a post (March 2006) about an idea, that I discussed with some other Revit users, to have Revit makes some automatic assumptions about how to assign an element to a workset without my doing so explicitly.

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