Define Layer Standards
“Break down” a layer into well defined components to make the process of assigning a layer a whole lot easier.
Layer names do not necessarily have to follow a certain “structure”, but defining a structure makes a lot of sense because everyone looking at a layer will immediately understand what its content is supposed to be. The other - even more important aspect of having a well defined structure in the naming of layers is the need to control what should be visible in a drawing by switching layers - or rather groups of layers by using “wildcards” like in “Layer off A-WALL*” to turn off all layers for walls.
The EDER Tool alows to dedine a “Layer-Standard” by braking the name down into components. Every component may either have a fixed length or use a “delimiter” to distinguish the components.
The value every component can be:
- a pre-defined list of values
- an arbitrary string
Having a list of values allows the user to simply select it from a list and keeps him from entering values which are not allowed.
In addition to that, each component has a certain “context” that defines where how the value is determined. Thes contexts are:
- User defined per Category
- Automatic
- Constant
Automatic components do not have to be provided by the user but are determined automatically. Automatic contexts options are:
- Material
- Status
- Projection
- Scale
The values for Material, Status etc. can then be “mapped” to the appropriate information in Revit. More about this can be found in the Documentation.
The objective of the EDER-Tool was to be be useful in every country of the world, therefore it was important to be able to model any layer-standard there may be. But it turned out that the concept had to be improved, and with Revit 2018, the functionality has been signigicantly extended with these extra featueres:
- Allow to define components that are only used for certain categories
- Extend the list of possible Context’s by “Parameter Driven”
It had turned out that some layer standards made a distinction between “model categories” and “annotation categories”. With this extension it is now possible to model this. The ohther extension is even more powerful, more on this in the section Use of Revit Parameters to define the layer.
The picture below shows the dialog to define and modify layer standards with a pretty comprehensive standard that had been developed in Austria.
An example of how the layer assignment is made by selecting from lists can be seen in Easy Layer Assignment.
It should also be noted that you can, of course, also define a Layer-Standard that does not have any structure at all. Simply create a Layer-Standard with on single component called “layer-name”!