By Dennis Collin
Rule based view filters have been around for many years in Revit and are a useful tool to affect and control the visibility or graphic display of elements.
Fig 1. Using filters to highlight specific objects
The function accesses element properties and sifts the element data which will then permit the display or not of selected items. Alternatively, users can emphasise certain elements with a different colour, line type or line weight in specific drawings, e.g. fire strategy, coordination drawings or for planning purposes.
Accessed via a right click menu on screen or the visibility graphics dialogue. View filters can be set and configured for views and then ideally set in view templates.
In Revit 2019 filters got an additional option in the sifting of data. With the use of the ‘OR’ logic condition. Previous versions were limited to just ‘AND’ which meant users to had to use clever workarounds to obtain solutions.
Fig 2. The new ‘OR’ condition within view filters.
With this improved functionality view overrides can be applied with fewer filters and is much easier to control the display of views.
Where these options are not sufficient users still have selection filters and category criteria options which can also be saved in view templates and applied to views when needed.
The override in view by element option on the right click menu should be avoided in almost every case! On training courses, I jokingly refer to it as the ‘Friday afternoon command’! This is because this tool doesn’t respect object data properties and cannot be easily transferred to other drawing views or shown in schedules. The eternal defence of using this command is ‘I am in a hurry’ or ‘I just need to get the drawing out’. But, setting up filters doesn’t take much longer to configure and should be easy to apply just with a few clicks especially with a good project template.
To be avoided! Use filters instead, it’s less work honest!
Override in view ‘By Category’ may be acceptable, but I tend to favour the use of rule based filters as that tends to embrace the whole principle of Revit, coordination and in the long term reduce such tedious tasks of data checking and manual amendments of drawings.