Friday, March 23, 2012

Improve Your Borrowing Experience

When you select an element and move it Revit has to see if it is currently borrowed by anyone else. This is referred to as transparent element borrowing. Click on a wall and drag it to another location. The slight or pronounced delay you "feel" or "see" between starting to drag and seeing it happen is affected by the "back office" work that Revit does between your local file and the central file.

You can alter the perception of responsiveness some by borrowing elements explicitly instead. I wrote perception because it may not actually take less time overall but you will experience less lag/drag/delay if the borrowing process is already sorted out.

What I'm suggesting is that you select the elements you intend to work on first, then right-click and choose "Make Elements Editable". This is an explicit instruction to Revit, "I want to borrow these!". It will check and let you become a borrower of everything that is current available. Anything that isn't will generate a message to that effect. You'll still have the rest though.

This means you open a view and decide where you want to work, select elements and make them editable. Then go about your business. Synchronize with Central when you finish with them...repeat.

Remember that the right-click option "Make Workset Editable" is becoming an Owner of a "shelf" and that normally isn't the best strategy. It will however accomplish the same thing as I suggest above, just for potentially many more elements than you need. Read the post from the other day regarding the notion of "Editable".

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