Heads or Tails? An Issue with Revit Section Callouts

In a recent case with a customer, they were experiencing an issue in Revit when trying to open a section view by double-clicking on a section callout.  Instead of the view opening, nothing happened.  The workaround was to right-click on the callout and select "Go to view" from the menu.

Normally, when double-clicking on the section head portion of a callout (highlighted in red below), the section view opens in Revit.  Take note that the section head is blue, while the rest of the callout is black.

 

However, when the customer attempted to double-click on the section callout in their project, nothing happened.  Below is an example of what the callout looked like.  While it generally looks OK, note that the section head is black in color, and not blue as in the example above.   What's the reason why the callout looked different, and more importantly, why didn't the section open when double-clicking it?

It comes down to heads or tails.

When selecting the family, clicking Edit Type and editing the Section Tag parameter, we discovered that the section head family was assigned to the Section Tail, whereas the Section Head was set to <none>.

What does this mean? 

While it is possible to place a section head family on the Section Tail (some companies show the symbol on both ends of the callout), only the Section Head of the callout responds to double-clicking and opens the view.  And the section callout displays as blue in the view only when associated with the Section Head parameter of the section tag.

Summary:   if you experience an issue where double-clicking a section callout does not open the section as expected, the first clue to look for is whether or not the section head displays as blue or black.  Then edit the family type to see if the Section Tag has graphics assigned to the Section Head or Tail.

About the Author

Jeremy Smith

Sr. Technical Support Specialist, AEC<br><br>Jeremy has been delivering service and technical support to customers in the AEC industry for over 25 years. He gained much of his AutoCAD/Revit experience serving as CAD Manager at multiple MEP/FP engineering firms in the Greater Boston Area. He then worked at Autodesk as a Technical Support Specialist, eventually becoming a manager overseeing the Revit and Vault support teams. Jeremy is excited to be in his current role as Sr. Technical Support Specialist at IMAGINiT, as it allows him the opportunity to work directly with customers every day and help them successfully leverage Autodesk’s solutions to achieve their business goals.

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