Revit Family Type Names Explained

By Jordan Mussett, IMAGINiT Building Solutions

Have you ever edited a family and afterward, your types look something like this? Keeping the original type even though you made two fresh new ones in the Family Editor?

Revit tends to hang onto Family Types until you purge them out. I like to think of it as a defense mechanism of sorts. It keeps you from deleting too much unintentionally.

I’m picking tags for the example here. More specifically, I will be using the Area Tag because I know that by default, this Tag has only one type. When there are no specific types of a Tag, or any family for that matter, the Type Name matches the family name. There will always be at least one type like shown below. The Area Tag has one type by default so it says the same thing in both lines.

I’m going to edit the family and add two extra types. I will start by clicking on one of the existing Tags and clicking Edit Family.

In the Family Editor, I will add two types, Area Tag w Comment and Area Tag w Area Type. The details of creating Tag Labels with appropriate visibility parameters is a topic for another time. I will load the Tag back into the project and choose “Overwrite existing version and its parameter values”. For the purposes of the Tag editing example, the option picked here doesn’t matter.

The main burning question is, how do I get rid of the extra line item here in the drop down? 

This is where the Purge Tool comes in. It is on the Manage Tab on the Settings Panel. 

You will need to use this to purge the extra Type out. The first thing I do in the dialogue is click “Check None”. If you do not click this button, everything that isn’t being used in the project currently will be gone. That means Wall Types, Title Blocks, Tags, Line Types, Text Styles, you name it. It can be very dangerous. We are looking for a specific target, so I will navigate to Annotation Symbols (Tags), find the one I no longer want, and click "ok".

This should get rid of your extraneous Family Type and leave you with only the Types you want.

 

Comments

[Ray Glover]

You could also find the family type in the project browser, right click on it, select delete and it will be deleted. If the type is still used in the project you will get a warning first.

[Jordan]

Ray, this is definitely another way to go about it. I normally go with the Purge tool because it is a bit safer but for the more seasoned user, deleting down in the project browser is a good tool too.