Please Note: Our Discussion forums have moved. If you would like to discuss this article or any aspect of Revit, please do so at www.forums.revit.biz We will be more than pleased to help you with ANY Revit query. Welcome to part 15 of this 17 part series on creating your own custom model components using the Family Editor. If you have just stumbled across this article without reading the previous parts of the series, you may want to start here In this article we are going to look at Types and how to pre-define Types for the components you create. But first of all let’s start off by looking at what (Revit) Types are exactly. Let’s take a Revit Door. Virtually any door from the standard Revit library will do…. 
What we are looking at here is the “Type Selector” on the Options Bar, towards the top of the screen. The actual Family name is “UK_IntSgl Dom Flush” For this particular family there are 3 Types pre-defined for your use. You can see the three types by activating the drop-down Type Selector…. 
Families can have just one Type (in fact they MUST have at least ONE Type) or as many types as you would like to define. So what is the real purpose of Types? Well, it is to give the User access to different “versions” of a Family Object. The Family itself is always fundamentally the same- the Types just varies a number of key parameters. So in our Door example- all 3 Types are fundamentally the same door, it is just the width (in this case) that varies between Types. But we are not constrained to just length (ie dimension) parameters when creating Types- in fact we can include the full range of parameters in determining our Types. It is probably easier to explain Types by showing you a very simple example where we create a component and then define some Types. OK, let’s keep the component nice and simple- we are interested in the concepts here, not the complexity of the model. I’m going to create a simple box with length, width and height parameters. I’m going to use a “Generic Model” family template and make my box from an extrusion. I’ll use 3 parameters to control the extrusion dimensions. 
Here is the plan sketch for the extrusion. Notice the dimension constraints I have placed with the corresponding labels. And here is the third parameter (“Height”) controlling the depth of the extrusion…. 
And here is our simple 3D component….. 
It does not get more simple than that! But that’s OK, we’re here to look at Types, so let’s set some up. Before we do, it’s worth just reviewing again why we would want to define some Types. Well, we have our basic box that a User could put into their model. But what if they want a box with different dimensions? Well, they could go into the Family Editor and change the parameters in there. They could also bring up the Element Properties panel and change them from there. But why not give the User a number of versions of the box, all with different pre-defined dimensions? This gives the User a selection of boxes to choose from- all easily available from the drop-down “Type Selector”.
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