Protect Dynamic blocks

This I have seen brought up quite a few times in the past and wondering how many people find this necessary or would like to have something like this?

The best approach I believe would be to put your dynamic block inside of an empty block and then have a tool that would update your dynamic properties inside of this block. This would also require you to not allow exploding on the empty block.

Will this keep everyone away from getting at your dynamic blocks – no, nothing is fool proof. It will keep the majority of the users from getting at them. If it is not in front of most users, they would not even try to get at it. With standards and processes in your company, it would protect from users at your company making changes and other things could be put in place to protect them even more.

Our block edit tool was designed to work with nested dynamic blocks from the top level down. However with a few changes, this could easily be switched to read the dynamic block inside of an empty block and allow you to change your properties.

I will be doing some testing to make sure there are not any issues of having multiple instances of the same block in your drawing file. Right now I do not see an issue with this.

Feel free to make your comments about this, if your for it or not and give any feed back.


Thanks

Patrick Johnson
President
Cad Enhancement, Inc

Revit Families found on the Web

I am hoping to get some comments on this subject to see if I am off/on base on my thoughts of the Revit Families on the web. Can you trust the Revit families that are found on the web to be accurate and usable in your project file.

There are many web sites out there that either sell families or allow you to earn points to upload and use to down load. Autodesk has gotten into the mix with Autodesk seek, which appears that quite a bit of their data have come from other web sites and users and as far as I can see these are in their database "as is"

The one issue I have is the lack of quality control that appears to be consistent with these web sites on their data. This makes me very leery on using this data - you know the saying when it comes to databases "Garbage in - Garbage out". Any in-accuracies will always be caught at the most in opportune times such at the construction site.

If you are looking to download Revit families on building product manufacturer data, you may be better off to go to the manufacturer's web site or contact the manufacturer to obtain families. At least you have to assume that these would be accurate in manufacturer data.

If you do use these sites, I highly recommend that you set up a process and quality control mechanism to make sure these families are accurate in their data and meet your standards prior to allowing them to be inserted into your project file.

Let me know your thoughts on this issue.

Patrick Johnson
President
Cad Enhancement, Inc