Automatic Numbering of Elements Within Revit 2015

by Dennis Collin

This document is for making Revit users of all disciplines, aware of the very using Element Positioning Utility within the Revit Extensions set of tools.

When working with Revit it is understood generally that Revit is really a big database, holding information on various building elements. Upon placing certain objects they get given an Alpha-Numeric reference referred to a 'Mark' which is a unique identifier of a component, which can help reference the location of an object within a plan to the corresponding entry of the component within a schedule.

Whilst certain elements like doors, windows and rooms in Architecture and certain objects within Structural and MEP disciplines. Some objects do not have the Mark field value entered automatically, and said value is left blank.

With Doors for example, Revit does a '+1' auto-increment with each object placed. IE. If you place a door referenced as D100 the next door placed will be numbered D101 and so on. However with other elements like Curtain Panels and Furniture this does not happen, and whilst numbering items can be done manually (as was done with conventional means) we tend to have an expectation that Revit should be able to do something better!

Fortunately it can! To do this however we need to install the Revit Extensions set of tools, which are available for download for AutoDesk Subscription Customers at http://subscription.autodesk.com login with your details and access the subscription benefits. There are several other useful utilities which can also be downloaded if needed.

Upon installing the Extensions, you will have an extra tab labelled 'Extensions' on the ribbon interface. Clicking on the tab, and accessing the tools dropdown will list amongst other items the Element Positioning utility.

This will then assign a reference to the mark and tag the elements for you. Although to be honest the tagging procedure doesn’t work too well with things like curtain panels. It functions satisfactorily on individual components like parking bays, and furniture etc. With the case of curtain panels I would use the standard 'TAG-ALL' facility or place the tags manually on the view(s) for clarity of reading.

In this example I drew a pair of curtain walls 4m high from Level 0 and Level 1 (the reason I did them as separate walls was to aid the numbering process to indicate levels). But if a simple entity reference is all that is required just place the walls as a single component.

Once you are ready to label the items, select the panels, using filters as appropriate and run the Element Positioning Facility.

The dialogue box above appears and you can choose your options on how the numbering should proceed taking to account X,Y and Z axis and directions. Also Level reference, Set, and individual element position.

The naming option reveals:

Note: I edited the formula to Read 'CrP-%L.%E'

For reference the codes refer to the following;

%L - Level

%S - Set/Group

%E - Entity

All other characters will display as entered.

Upon choosing tags you get a number of options to consider, including what tag family to be used, which views to tag, leader placement options and readability options. If desired you can switch off the Tag placement option and do that process manually yourself.

NB. That is what I did for the curtain panel example shown below.

Whilst the number sequence may not be exactly what is desired, it nevertheless gives each element a unique reference which can easily be edited in a variety of means, speeding up the production of numerous drawings and tedious schedules.

This also works well on other items like furniture, which is another example of category that has a blank entry against the Mark field.