Pattern Tips

autoLink uses pattern matching to recognize links in your text and parameter values. This provides a powerful way to easily and automatically set links to views. However, if the pattern is too broad you can end up getting quite a few false positives as well. These will show up as notifications that something looked like a link but was not found so no link was set.

False positives aren’t dangerous, but they can be annoying, especially if there are a lot of them. Because of that, we recommend tuning your pattern(s) to match your naming standards as specifically as possible. The default autoLink pattern is designed to match most naming and numbering systems we have seen in use so that new users don’t have to think too hard about patterning before they get started with the program, however this also means that it’s pretty generic and may generate some false positives.

Lets say you have a sheet pattern like *?*?*?*?*?. This matches any piece of text that has between 1 and 5 characters; in other words any word that is between 1 and 5 characters will match. While that will work to match sheet A101, it will also match many other words that will generate false positives. It would be much better to distinguish between alphabetic characters and numeric characters, and to make the length as specific as possible. So if you always have a letter and three numbers, a much better pattern would be @###. This will match only text that is a letter followed by 3 numeric characters which will greatly reduce false positives.

To take this a step further, you can also use Regular Expressions (.NET implementation) for matching if you are familiar with that. This is a much more advanced matching system but also much harder to learn. We wouldn’t recommend learning Regular Expressions just for this, but if you already know how to use it you can apply it here and make a very specific matching pattern and likely cut out all false positives.

Note that the above references the new pattern matching system as of Revit workFlow 12.0. For older versions of Revit workFlow please see the following example pattern:

Let’s say you have a pattern like *****#/#*****. This matches any piece of text that has between 1 and 6 characters, a slash, and then between 1 and 6 characters. While that will work to match your view 12/A101, it will also match many other things; almost any fraction, things like ‘and/or’, etc. These will all come up as false positive notifications. A much better pattern would be to use the pattern *#/####. This requires either 1 or 2 characters for the detail number and exactly 4 characters for the sheet number. This still matches your view, but no longer matches fractions (at least ones that don’t have a 4 digit denominator) or ‘and/or’. This will greatly cut down on false positives.