Project parameters not populating correctly in panel schedule template

Revit
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1

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new to Revit and Dynamo (just started about a month ago), but found that I picked it up really quickly and I have been asked by a few people at work to make scripts for them. I was approached and asked if I could make a script to change how panel schedules populate the load summary section, and thus began my journey into attempting to work around the restrictive panel schedule functionality in Revit. I had two main goals with my script:

  1. Compare the overall heating and cooling loads to automatically determine which is larger and apply the desired demand factors to each.
  2. Provide a way to show the largest motor separately and apply its demand factor separately.

I have done a lot of research on this, and have seen many of the complaints in forums about the restrictions of Revit’s panel schedules. My solution was to create project parameters which I would then use to populate the loads summary section of the panel schedule template. So my script checks if the new parameters have already been added to the project, and then creates the project parameters for connected loads, demand factors, and estimated demands, as well as the total connected and estimated demand loads, and total connected and estimated demand currents. Most of the parameters directly copy the values calculated in Revit, except for the ones I needed to calculate in the script. I created a custom template that uses these project parameters in the load summary section instead of the OOTB parameters.

Here is my template working correctly:

Screenshot 2024-10-01 134704
Screenshot 2024-10-01 1347041190×381 12.2 KB

I would upload a screenshot of the template itself with the parameters, but I’m a new user and can only post one screenshot.

My script works exactly as intended and I don’t have any issues there.
However, I ran into a major problem when I decided to delete the project parameters to test the whole process from the beginning. Once I did that, the panel schedules no longer populated.

My questions:
I’m assuming the reason this happened is because the parameter ID’s of the newly created parameters no longer matched the parameters I had originally selected in the template, even though the names are the same? Does anyone know a workaround or quick fix for this? I need this template to be useable across multiple projects, but it depends on Dynamo being able to create the project parameters and the ability to use them to populate the fields in the template without having to change anything manually. I felt like I was on the brink of making something very useful, and I’m hoping this isn’t the doom of my script.

2

This is really more of a general Revit question at this point, so it would be more suited for a Revit forum, but the easiest solution is to use shared parameters. There are weird issues specifically with how panels and loads handle element binding in Revit so you may still have issues if you’re adding and removing things every time. But, in general, you should be safer with shared parameters, since those would be consistent across all uses and all models.

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3

Okay thanks! I’ll give that a shot and see if it works. And if I have a more Revit specific question, I’ll be sure to post it in a different forum. I just wasn’t exactly sure where this question belonged as it still involved Dynamo, and I had hoped there may have been a workaround in Dynamo I could use.

4

No worries. There are plenty of discussions that will be borderline. There’s not really a right or wrong choice, but it’s up to you to make that call. Typically, you need to know what’s going on in Revit before you can automate it in Dynamo. Unless you’re looking for specific direction on how to handle or avoid something in Dynamo, it’s best to start with Revit first.

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