Weekly Revit Tip - Need elements locked in Revit!?

Work-sharing : Work-set Locking

There will most likely be a time when your working on a project that not only needs work-sets setup but it also have a number of designers within that one project file. We all know, the more CAD designers within a project file the higher the chances of a project standard becoming vulnerable and certain information that you would like to prevent from being edited is exposed for change. An example for instances, the building grids have been established in a project and for no reason will the location change or for anyone  to edit them. Unfortunately, Revit does not come with "layer lock" or any sort of “lock” tool, but as long as Work-sharing is enabled work-sets can be utilize as "locks". 

To do this, from the Application menu, choose Options and then change the user name to “Admin” or something similar. Make sure the items you want to “lock” are on a workset dedicated to this purpose. In the example above, if you want to lock the building grids, you can simply check out the Shared Levels and Grids workset. Otherwise, you can create a custom workset, place elements on it and then “lock” it. To lock a workset, simply open the “Worksets” dialog, select the workset you want to lock and click the Editable button. The name Admin will appear in the Owner column (see below Figure 20).

Figure 20—To “lock” a workset, create an Admin user and leave it checked out

Click OK to dismiss the dialog and then close the project file. When you synchronize, do not relinquish User-created Worksets. This means that the user “Admin” will continue to own the workset even after quitting Revit. No one else will be able to modify the Shared Levels and Grids (or other workset locked this way) until Admin returns to the file and relinquishes.

Important: This tip goes against what is normally considered best practice when working with work-sharing Revit files. Typically,it's not good practice to have anyone close out of the project file without relinquishing. But in this case we make an exception since our goal is the locking of a particular work-sets. Make sure to use this technique with care and caution.