Thread: Door From/To Room Value in Schedule

Originally Posted by Steve_Stafford

... Seems to me the app is just as likely to get it wrong depending on whose criteria is in play?....

Yeah, that's correct. As I said in my blog post this is a *feature* in Revit and this app is a workaround to this *feature* if one wants to quickly update Fromo/To values in schedule. Also, as I mentioned in my OP I am planning to add a feature whereby you have "Yes/No" checkbox for doors you want to exclude from being updated by this app. Riser,corridor, bathroom, stair etc are classic exammples where you may want to change From/To rule depending on your prefered documentation system.
R

Interesting discussion. In my experience (US only and 12 years out) the identification of a door with a specific room was primarily for the purpose of numbering. To Room and From Room were for the purpose of identifying location and swing direction. In a schedule doors were listed in order of their number. This naturally ordered them by room. While the default assumption was that a door was identified ornumbered based on the To Room, there were many cases such as doors opening into corridors where the door was identified based on the From Room. This may not be the case in all markets, and this may not be the only use of the association of door to room.
Beyond setting numbering, how would you leverage the association of a door with a specific single room (vs To or From)?
If you had the opportunity to build the schedule you want, how would you organize doors? Would you include other information about the associated room?

Here is a fairly typical schedule. We do a lot of multi-unit work (hotels, assisted living, apartments etc) and typically seperate out the unit doors from the common area doors. In this schedule the sprinkler & mechanical doors were seperated as well. I didn't work on this project so I'm not sure why. Seperating doors out keeps the schedule from having 1200 doors on it (3 - 6 doors per unit * 200 units + common area doors.) We generally don't specify to / from or swing direction on our schedule. Finishes are broken down in a similar fashion.

Doors are assigned a number based on their primary room. Doors opening to a hallway will get tagged with the room they open to / from rather than the hall. Closets without a seperate number follow in sequence of the room (101a, 101b etc)

Unit doors are the same in every unit and get scheduled with just a letter and are called out on enlarged plans.

Related to this are a few discussions on annotating Units versus rooms in the units:

Need Best Practice Advice for Rooms
Hospitality buildings?

The attached schedule was done in Excel and the project was all in CAD prior to having Revit in the office. I've been able to get pretty close in Revit without too much issue.

Originally Posted by David Conant

Interesting discussion. In my experience (US only and 12 years out) the identification of a door with a specific room was primarily for the purpose of numbering. To Room and From Room were for the purpose of identifying location and swing direction. In a schedule doors were listed in order of their number. This naturally ordered them by room. While the default assumption was that a door was identified ornumbered based on the To Room, there were many cases such as doors opening into corridors where the door was identified based on the From Room. This may not be the case in all markets, and this may not be the only use of the association of door to room.
Beyond setting numbering, how would you leverage the association of a door with a specific single room (vs To or From)?
If you had the opportunity to build the schedule you want, how would you organize doors? Would you include other information about the associated room?

Well, if I had my way, there would be two changes:

1. Separate parameter to set which room a door belongs to (for the purpose of numbering).
- Imvho this should be done independently from doorswing. One has nothing to do with the other. If this was the intended use I do get why the link between T/F Room and the actual orientation is broken, but it seems weird to have 2 parameters for this. You assign a door to a room and be done with it.
- Daylighting schedules for windows. I always have to check whether I by accident didn't misplace a window and flip it later. Cause it needs to be placed so that the To Room field is assigned the Room specifics. A problem I wouldn't have when it's just a single parameter.

2. Have the T/F Room parameter on a live link with the door orientation. This is extremely useful in several ways:
- Evacuation plans. Based on the size of a room, the function and the occupency load a Door must swing in the direction of the flight path or not. I use schedules to automatically check for this, but in current workflow can only do this with the api.
- Same with some room functions: for safety reasons, a front entrance door swings inwards (to prevent burglary). A bathroom door always swings towards the hall (so it can't be blocked by someone slipping and falling). Same for toilet door. And so on. Since I got Key Schedules set up for room functions and corresponding building code regulations, I also have a parameter for mandatory swing direction. Which I can only check using the API.
- Air flows. Granted, probably only for the users working on smaller projects. But at least in Holland it's customary to have air extraction in bathroom/kitchen/toilet. Air supply comes from windows in bedrooms, living room and so on. The air travels underneath doors to the point of extraction. I have this set up to a 99% but lack the possibility to automatically check my airflow symbol to the desired flow direction. (same goes for windows btw)
- I have schedules which determine whether a Door has to be Fire Rated or not. Basically, when a Door is from a Room in Fire Compartment A going to Fire Compartment B, it's supposed to have a value for a Fire Rating. If not, then there shouldn't be a value. (and the height of the value is derived from the total Room Area for a Fire Compartment, function and amount of levels).
- I have schedules which determine what width a door should have based on several calculations (fire evacuation path, ADA clearance, function of the room)
- And some other stuff, which I can't think off right now (if you want I can get back to you on that later when I'm at my pc)

O, one more thing side-stepping a bit:
PLEASE add Calculated Values as a full-blown parameter which can be used in tags. Or add the possibility to create calculations for shared parameters (even better). That would make my life soooo much easier. I am now often forced to create a separate schedule which includes two parameters: the calculated value and the SP which needs to be manually set to the identical value. It's agravating...

I have updated this plugin to take care of multiple phases in a model. You can download the updated plugin from the blog link shown on the first page.
R