Updated on the Revit Shared Parameters Converter...and failures

I really love this tool - that's why I covered it in my AU class last year. It's extremely helpful when you start to use families from manufacturers, or if you're trying to get the Autodesk out-of-the-box families to align with your custom schedules. But as we've been using it more, we keep coming across file failures. Unfortunately, the program only tells you which files failed to update, and doesn't say what caused the failure. We've figured out a few things on our end that could be causing the failure, and are adopting this process:

- Copy the files you're updating to a new folder on your c: drive, and create the destination folder where you want the updated files located. Do this by logical group - pumps, tanks, etc. should be edited one group at a time
- Set your log location to the destination folder, and then pick your shared parameter file. In that file, start with common number or text based items, for example, that you know won't exist in the target files. In our case, these are scheduling parameters that are simply informational parameters, so they're set up as common discipline, text and numbers, or discipline specific parameters that are NOT associate with a connector associated parameter.
- Make sure you pick each of the parameters you're adding and set them to the correct group - for whatever reason, I kept forgetting this step...ugh...
- Run these easy ones first - the successful conversion will show up in the destination folder, and the failures will show up in their own failure folder - so you can open these to see what happened (or didn't, in most cases)
- Re-run the tool with parameters that are likely to be associated with a connector, and may already exist in the target family. This is where we're finding the failures, with items like voltage, number of poles, etc. There doesn't seem to be a specific reason why it fails - sometimes it works, others it doesn't. Run this against the families that were created in the destination folder (make sure you create a new destination folder for these files)
- Run the tool again - if it fails this time, take the files in the failure folder and burn 'em...no, actually you'll have to manually edit these - which works every time.

Shared parameter converter helps you with the majority of your files, but you will hit some roadblocks - we still use it to handle the bulk of the conversions, but don't get discouraged if it fails...and Autodesk - how about a little more detail about the failures themselves...please?

thanks - David B.