Placed components override wall lineweights

Had a question today, regarding components which would override the lineweight of the walls they where placed up against.

The solution:
1. Open the component (family) in the family editor
2. Locate the build in masking region
3. In the element properties of the masing region, uncheck the "Draw in Foreground" box
4. Hit "OK"
5. Create a new Ref. Plane, just above the Ref. Level, and name it "Mask"
6. Select the masking region, and set it´s work plane to the new "Mask" Ref. Plane
7. Load the component into your project.

Formula to return the highest value

For the family builders, here´s a quick trick to return the highest of three values (user inputs)

We need something like the following parameters:

Length A (User input)
Length B (User input)
Length C (User input)
Calc (Only used to get our final result)
Return Length (Returns the greatest of the three length parameters)

The formulas needed goes like this:

Calc = if(Length A > Length B, Length A, Length B)

Return Length = if(Calc > Length C, Calc, Length C)


Download the sample family from HERE

Edit:

While talking about this topic at the Augi Forums, Joe Zhou came up with this genius formula (The result is the same, but you won´t need the "Calc" parameter...

Return Length = if(and(or(Length A > Length B, Length A = Length B), or(Length A > Length C, Length A = Length C)), Length A, if(and(or(Length B > Length A, Length B = Length A), or(Length B > Length C, Length B = Length C)), Length B, if(and(or(Length C > Length A, Length C = Length A), or(Length C > Length B, Length C = Length B)), Length C, 0 mm)))

OK... the formula itself is a nightmare, but it WORKS !

Design Options - Elevation Bug

Yesterday, I was explaining Design Options to a client, and went thru the setting of different views for the options - It turned out to a bit of a nightmare. First I startet with setting up the View Properties for a plan view, then a Section View

But when I went to set up the Elevation Views, something was missing:

So I went looking for it in other elevation views, but still no luck... so I told the Client not to do Design Options which would affect Elevevation Views.... Not really.... i´m sure it´s a BUG, but the under Visibility/Graphics, it´s possible to set the desired Design Option:

Hope "The Factory" is gonna fix this before 2020 :-)