Revit - Add detail references to your door schedules*

*this works just as well for window schedules, too!

A typical office standard is to have head/jamb/sill details listed in the overall Door Schedule. Revit does a great job of tracking and coordinating those references throughout the views, but doesn't give the end user a way to automatically link them into a schedule.

As a workaround, a firm could always simply add/create a new field in the schedule for each of those details, but that requires a manual input for each one, and for each door. Commercial and institutional projects that contain hundreds of doors would have a LOT of input to manage - 100+ doors x 3-4 details each - ouch! Plus, a lot of these references would be repetitive as typical detail sets.

A more efficient way to accomplish this would be to utilize Revit Key Schedules.

Create a Door Detail Reference KEY:
1. Start a new schedule: View > Schedule/Quantities. Associate the schedule to the Doors category, and select the radio button for a Key Schedule. Name the schedule (i.e. Door Detail Reference KEY) and give it a Key Name (i.e. Door Assembly Type)

2. Select from the available fields to add to the Key Schedule (optional).

Create new fields to hold your detail reference information:
3. On the Fields tab, select the Add Parameter... button and create new fields for each of your head/jamb/sill details. (TIP: Select TEXT as the Type of Parameter, if you represent your details as 12/A4.5, so that the "/" is not rejected)

4. Select OK to create your Key Schedule.

Create the detail sets:
5. Create a row for each set you will need.

6. Name the numbered sets to list out the various door frame-to-wall groupings in your project. (ie: HM to FrameWall, HM to CMU (EXT), HM to CMU (INT), SF to FrameWall (EXT), etc.)

7. As the door details are created and located onto sheets, update the Key Schedule with their location by manually typing in the detail reference.



Link the Key Schedule into the Door Schedule:
8. Open the project Door Schedule. In View Properties, on the Fields tab, select the Key Schedule fields and add them to the Door Schedule fields list. Move them up/down on the list in the order you want them to appear from Left to Right in the schedule.

9. Select OK out of all dialogs to view your combined schedule.

10. Under the key name field (Door Assembly Type in the example), select the appropriate set from the pull-down list. This automatically brings in the data from the Key Schedule to update your reference details.



(TIP: I like to make the key name field a hidden field, as it's only a descriptor used by the designer to link in the Key Schedule data)

There you go! Detail references in your Door Schedule!

NOTE: as the project develops, and detail references are modified/relocated, the Key Schedule will need to be updated manually. Assigning the sets to each door in the Door Schedule automatically brings in the reference data, so manual input is greatly minimized.

Contributed by: Nancy McClure, AEC Application Specialist, Ideate Inc.