Make the Product Entry of Fabrication .itm files reportable on a schedule
Above is a link to an Autodesk forum post, please take a read if you are able to.
As some of you may know, the “Product Entry” parameter is not able to report in Revit Schedules. I have yet to learn of a rational reason for this, however it can be troublesome when you need to report the contents of this parameter.
The current solution, according to Autodesk support, is a dynamo script that will copy the values of “Product Entry” into a custom Text parameter of the users’ choosing.
That seems to work fine, except when you consider the possibility of the model changing. Basically it’s a great bandaid, but one that should be unnecessary if we could just report “Product Entry” in schedules normally.
Just wanted to shed some light on this topic as it theoretically effects a lot of industries that utilize Revit for reporting purposes.
I don’t use FabParts, but couldn’t you just store that data in another field? Seems silly so I upvoted all the same. 
If the desire to ensure things are kept up to date is a concern, you could always build an add-in containing a dynamic updater instead of utilizing Dynamo. Out of scope for my colleagues in support but a nice progression of skills for you!
Absolutely, there are workarounds like you mentioned. However, if Revit treated “Product Entry” like other parameters, then there would be zero need for a workaround, unless I’m mistaken.
We have tried to create a formula parameter that simply reports the value of “Product Entry” but we were not able to get that working for some reason.
I believe part of the reason why is because much of the ITM data comes from an external source, so using formulas will be tricky (if at all possible)… If I have any epiphany in the topic I’ll post back, but they are rather restrictive.
Which is exactly why Revit should just allow users to display and report out the “Product Entry” parameter OOTB.
If Dynamo can grab that parameter value and manipulate the data, then it begs the question: Why can’t a Revit Schedule display the parameter?
Because it’s not a Revit native data source, so an external component has to be used to transfer the data to Revit which means this can’t be a normal parameter to ensure that things move consistently between the ITM and the RVT…
Frustrating I know, but there would be a host of more restrictive issues without this intermediate step based entirely on limitations with tying ITMs into a database and then into Revit. Have pulled a lot of my own hair out trying to make the same work consistently on the back end… there’s only so much that could be accurately driven in one go.