Display fire rating symbol with doors in Revit®

In your Revit project documentation, sometimes you want to display parameters or values that are not available in Tag’s Label dialog.

Let’s take an example:

Door fire rating is a system parameter that you can use (and tag) with a door family. But, you do not want to display parameter value but rather a symbol representing value (or a range). There is no way that Revit will allow this to happen using regular Tags, that is, Tag familiy cannot “read” a value and then “decide” what graphic symbol to use. You must do this manually by using “correct” tag or tag type.

There is, however, an alternative solution. It is not coolest solution because it is off Revit’s logic (where model elements and annotations are separated) but it works.

What you need to do is:

• Create Generic Annotation families of different symbols (for example: family of empty circle, family of a full circle).
• Put them into separate subcategory (this will allow you to turn them off later by turning of their subcategory instead of whole Generic Annotation category). When you are drawing you symbols in Generic Annotation, there is “Filled” instance parameter, that’s cool.
• Import this family into your door family, link it with label so different symbols can be chosen and that’s it!
• Inside door family, you can add “inside/outside” visibility parameters, and some additional parameters which controls position of the generic annotation family.

As I already mention, it is not the coolest solution, but it works. You can turn it off in Generic Annotation subcategory of the Visibility / Graphic overrides dialog. Also, because they are Annotation category, their size is not scale dependant!

Hope it helps!