Databases are at the core of any information management system. As a system for Building Information Modeling, Revit is no different. And by definition, databases are only as good as the data they contain. So one thing that’s covered in any study of databases is the importance of accurate and consistent data for maintaining data integrity.
Recently, a customer sent me their shared parameters file to use in modeling their families. The families involved had electrical connectors. When it comes to connectors, you always want to associate the parameters within the connector to parameters in the family. And if you want that information for schedules or calculations, the latter will most likely be shared parameters.
In this case, the electrical connector had a parameter to store the phase called Number of Poles. I entered the information from the customer in the connector parameter, and went to associate it with a shared parameter from the customer’s shared parameters file. The problem was that the shared parameter for phase had been created with a datacategory of number, whereas the connector’s phase parameter was, as its name implied, in number of poles.
The difference in datacategory meant that the connector’s parameter couldn’t be associated with the family’s shared parameter. A new shared parameter with a different name had to be added to the family in order to pick up the phase from the connector. And the two shared parameters couldn’t be linked via a formula either (unless they were made unitless), due to the same issue of having different datacategories.
This kind of inconsistency can easily compromise a project’s data integrity in Revit. For example, an engineer might be working with the family in a project. He updates the connector’s phase parameter, thinking that this information will carry through for scheduling, but the schedule is actually using the first shared parameter for phase, the one formatted as a number. Or maybe the engineer updates the number-format shared parameter and assumes that he’s updated the connector’s phase parameter, not noticing the second shared parameter formatted as number of poles. The point is that an inconsistency in data entry led to having redundant shared parameters thereby weakening the project’s data integrity.
Just something to keep in mind when creating shared parameters…
