Have you ever wanted to change the category which a shared parameter was organized under but no matter what you did the shared parameter would remain “stuck”? This often happens when custom shared parameters have somehow moved to a category that didn’t make any sense and now you wanted to move the parameter back to it’s rightful spot.
For example in a given family, say you wanted a shared parameter in the “Graphics” category, but for some reason it ended up in the “Other” category. The natural thing to do would be to edit family, change the shared parameter’s category in the family, then reload it back into the project. Though you realize after reloading, the shared parameter remained in the “Other” category. It’s annoying because the shared parameter should be organized with other parameters in the “Graphics” category, and also the “Other” category is at the very bottom of the properties menu which requires a lot of scrolling down to find the parameter.
The solution may seem daunting if the only way to resolve this is to insert the family into a brand new project and ensure that this new project starts with the parameters in the correct categories. There actually is a trick to fix this.
If a parameter in a family is “stuck” to a category, then the way to change the category is to load the Shared Parameter as a Project Parameter, then choose the desired category (such as “Text” or “Model Properties” or “Identity Data”) and choose the appropriate family category it belongs to. Then once you’re done, you will see that the Shared Parameter has switched to the desired category. You can then remove the parameter from the project to clean up Project Parameters. Magic.
Why does this work? It seems that Revit associates a Shared Parameter to a category the first time a family is loaded into a project. If that Shared Parameter is not also a Project Parameter, then somehow the Shared Parameter gets stuck and Revit does not know how to update the category even when it changed in the family. The only way Revit knows how to reorganize the parameter into a new parameter is when that specific Shared Parameter is also added as a Project Parameter.
This method also assumes you know the exact same Shared Parameter with the same GUID that needs to be added to the project.
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