Group Protections

In this article

• Why you need Group Protections
• Customize Group Protections
• End user experience
• Project Administrator notifications
• Common rule set examples

Guardian’s Group Protections ensures only model elements permitted by the Project/Company Administrator are allowed within Revit Model and Detail groups within Revit. Once activated for the project model, Group Protections will display a customized Guardian Command Message when an end user attempts to save a group with elements that have been identified to be prohibited from groups.

This feature is an additional asset to the Command: Create Group protection within User Commands. This expands on protecting groups by specifying certain elements that are to be prohibited from being placed in groups.

Why You Need Group Protections

We heard from our clients there are certain elements that just do not play nice with Revit Model and Detail groups. Many times, groups with these elements become corrupted, cause glitches in the model and, at times, causes models to crash. Guardian’s Protected Families allows the Project/Company Administrator to determine which elements are safe and not safe to use in Revit groups.

Customize Group Protections

When Group Protections is first enabled within Project Configurations under the Custom Interactions tab, it will be adopted by each project model once the model is registered. Group Protections can be further customized at the project level within Project Settings on a model-by-model basis.

Editing and creating rules under Customize behaviors when grouping elements will activate Group Protections. 

Select the settings cog to configure rules that will automatically apply the Group Protections to any elements that meet the rules conditions.

Select the New button to create a new rule to identify which elements are to be group protected. Create as many rules as necessary for the elements that need to be protected. Please note, the rules will be processed in the order in which they are displayed. Use the arrow buttons to arrange the proper order of the rules.

Different AND/OR statement types can be used to create rules to meet specific needs using a variety of conditions.

Conditions available:

Category conditions can be used to specify categories that should be protected. Administrators can also specify categories that should be ignored by the rule.

The protection mode for the selected elements can be customized as follows:

• Set the Guardian Protection Mode to: Monitor, Guide, or Prevent.
• ‍Send Email: If checked, will notify the Project Administrator when an end user attempts to save a group with protected elements.
• Req. Comment: If checked, requires the end user to provide a comment to proceed with grouping the protected model element.
• ‍Edit Message: Allows the Project Administrator to customize a Command Message that the end user will see when they attempt to group protected elements.

Pro Tip: List the elements not permitted within the Command Message so users know exactly which elements have been excluded and why.

End user experience

When an end user attempts to group a protected element, Guardian will alert them with the custom Command Message provided by the Project Administrator (If the Protection Mode is set to Guide or Prevent).

If Req. Comment is set within the Custom Interactions settings for Group Protections, the end user will be required to provide a comment to proceed with grouping the selected elements.

If set to Prevent mode, the end user will be required to provide the Project Password or One-Time Password to proceed with grouping the protected elements.

Project Administrator Notifications

There are two ways for Project Administrator to receive notifications; Project Central and Email Notifications.

Any Group Protections rules that have been triggered will appear automatically within Project Central’s activity feed.

Enable email notifications in the individual rule set dialog by checking Send Email. When an end user attempts to group an element that has been protected, the Project Administrator will be notified with an email containing the pertinent information.

Common Rule Set Examples

Creating effective AND/OR rule sets can be a bit challenging at first. To help you get quickly started, we've developed a set of pre-configured Group Protection rule sets. These templates serve as both practical examples and ready-to-use solutions, allowing you to implement robust protections right away while you familiarize yourself with the system.

Prevent: Annotation Categories

Used to Prevent most Annotations from being included in groups, except for Dimensions and Text Notes in this case.

Prevent: Model Categories

Used to Prevent some Model Categories from being included in groups.

Prevent: In-Place Families

Used to Prevent the inclusion of in-place families in groups.

Prevent: Model Groups

Used to prevent model groups from being included in groups.

Prevent: Detail Groups

Used to Prevent detail groups from being included in groups.

Prevent: Line Based Families

Used to Prevent line-based families from being included in groups.

Prevent: Images and PDFs

Used to Prevent images and PDFs from being included in groups.

Prevent: Hosted Families

Used to prevent Hosted Families from being included in groups when their host is not included.

Combining all the above into a single rule:

The examples above can also be included in a single rule using an OR condition. Guardian 3.2 has this rule already created.