We found this presentation online about AECOsim, which mentions (p19):
"unification across families: no longer an issue in BuildingDesigner"
(source: http://www.evolve-consultancy.com/article.php?incat_id=162&category_id=15)
how do you make this work? When chosing a unifier part I only see the ones within the same family to chose from...
I think what you're referring to is covered by the section "Concatenation of Parts and Families" in the Help file, and specifically this: "An additional benefit of Concatenation is that it enables parts, acting as unifier parts, to be stored in multiple XML files when they share the same family name."
I checked this but it doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for (at least what I think). An example of what I would think the presentation is refering to is this:
FAMILY: '1' PART: 'A'
FAMILY: '2' PART: 'B'
FAMILY: '3' PART: 'C'
Part 'B' and 'C' both refering to part 'A' (which is for both in a different family) as their unifier part.
Windows 10 pro
OpenBuildings Designer Connect Edition 2023 | 23.00.00.114
That is something we don't have today. I'd imagine we will at some point, or at least an equivalent end result, since it has been requested before.
So it is not possible to get a unification for a section?
Or should we put all parts in a single family?
My recommendation would be to put all 'Wall Components' in a single Family. These would typically coincide with the material of the wall leaf. In the delivered US dataset these are all in the WallComponent family. Concatenation of Families/Parts means that you can have these parts in the WallComponent family stored in more than one XML file. These could be a company standard level, project level, and/or client level. As long as their Family name matches you can unify parts even though they may be stored in different XML files.
With all "Wall Components" in a single family, you can then create a Compound Family of "Wall Assemblies" that references the parts from the "Wall Component" family and you will be able to unify without any problems. My one warning with compound parts is that if you have a company level Compound Family and a project Compound Family I would not recommend using the same name. Concatenation of Compound Families isn't really even necessary since they really just reference single layer parts from the "Wall Component" Family to be unified.
What you CANNOT do... Have a Family called WallComponents and another one called WallComponents_Project and unify parts from WallComponents with parts in WallComponents_Project.
-Travis