Home / Guides / Sign
Data panelSign

Before an office bets a floor on a sign family, Sign proves it holds on your own walls.

Face-based families lie politely: an instance can be created, report success, and come back hosted on nothing at all. Sign's face probe walks the first doors of your active view, tries to place your own sign family on each door's wall face, and measures — after regeneration — whether it actually stayed hosted. One transaction, rolled back by default, and a plain-text report you can hand to whoever maintains the family.

Revit 2024–2027One transaction, rolled back by defaultMeasured, never assumedWorks with no sign family loaded
Video guideComing soon on BIMIO’s YouTube
Why Sign exists

“Placed” and “hosted” are different questions.

The API will happily create a face-based instance with no host, and there is no call to re-host it afterwards. A tool that trusts the placer's own claim writes a floor of signs that are not actually on the walls.

Trusting the placer
  • A family that “places fine” in a sandbox file and fails on the project's linked and stacked walls.
  • Success reported by the call that created the instance, not by the model afterwards.
  • Finding out at door 180 that the family was never face-hostable here.
The same doors, through the probe
  • Door by door: was a wall face found, did a sign place, and is it STILL hosted after regeneration.
  • Where the placer's claim and the measurement disagreed, the notes say so.
  • Everything rolled back before the probe finishes — the model ends exactly as it started.
  • A clipboard report with the summary and every verdict, ready for the family author.
A probe, start to finish

Aim it. Run it. Read the measured verdicts.

The probe is a sample, not a run: the first doors of the active view, one transaction, rolled back unless you ask otherwise.

Open it

A window that says what it is going to do.

Sign opens on any project — a family document is refused with its reason — and the headline states the door count and the exact scope: the first 10 doors of the active view, or of the whole model if the view holds none. No setup, no configuration files: the window is the whole contract.

New to Revit: a placement test that declares its sample before running it.
BIMIO · Sign — sign every door with the room it opens ontoBIMIO
Sign — face probe
This model has 24 doors. The probe measures the first 10 doors of the active view — or of the whole model, if the view holds none — and reports, door by door, what it actually managed to do.
No sign family is loaded in this project
Sign mounts each label on a wall face, so it needs a family whose placement is work-plane based — face-hostable. This project has none loaded, which is the normal state of a fresh model and not a fault in the tool. Load your practice’s sign family the usual way, from Insert ▸ Load Family, then press Reload.
You can still run the probe without one: it will report which way each door is handed and what wall faces it found, and stay quiet only about placing.
Reload
Leave the placed signs in the modelDoors to probe−  10  +
Nothing probed yet
Run probe walks the first few doors of the active view and reports, one row each, whether a wall face was found, whether a sign could be placed on it, and whether the sign was still hosted afterwards. With the switch above off, everything it places is rolled back before it finishes.
ReloadCopy reportRun probe
Aim it

Your family, your doors, your sample size.

Only work-plane-based families are listed, because a sign is hosted on a wall face and no other placement type can be. The stepper moves in fives, because the probe is a sample, not a run. And with no sign family loaded, the empty state says so in words — the normal state of a fresh model, not a fault — while the probe still answers its read-only half: which way each door is handed, and what wall faces it found.

New to Revit: a test aimed at your practice's own family — not a demo one.
BIMIO · Sign — sign every door with the room it opens ontoBIMIO
Sign — face probe
This model has 24 doors. The probe measures the first 10 doors of the active view — or of the whole model, if the view holds none — and reports, door by door, what it actually managed to do.
Sign family and type
Door Sign — Room Name · 150 × 150
Only work-plane-based families are listed. A sign is hosted on a wall face, and no other placement type can be.
Leave the placed signs in the modelDoors to probe−  10  +
Nothing probed yet
Run probe walks the first few doors of the active view and reports, one row each, whether a wall face was found, whether a sign could be placed on it, and whether the sign was still hosted afterwards. With the switch above off, everything it places is rolled back before it finishes.
ReloadCopy reportRun probe
Run it

One transaction, and the model ends as it started.

“BIMIO Sign — face probe” places real instances, measures them, and rolls the whole thing back — unless Leave the placed signs in the model is ticked, and the state either way is spelled out beside the switch: off, “the model ends exactly as it started”; on, “One Ctrl+Z takes them out again.” Every hop to the API thread re-checks the document, so a model switched mid-click gets a refusal, never a write.

New to Revit: a destructive-looking test that is provably non-destructive.
BIMIO · Sign — sign every door with the room it opens ontoBIMIO
Sign — face probe
This model has 24 doors. The probe measures the first 10 doors of the active view — or of the whole model, if the view holds none — and reports, door by door, what it actually managed to do.
Sign family and type
Door Sign — Room Name · 150 × 150
Only work-plane-based families are listed. A sign is hosted on a wall face, and no other placement type can be.
Leave the placed signs in the modelDoors to probe−  10  +
Nothing probed yet
Run probe walks the first few doors of the active view and reports, one row each, whether a wall face was found, whether a sign could be placed on it, and whether the sign was still hosted afterwards. With the switch above off, everything it places is rolled back before it finishes.
ReloadCopy reportRun probe
Read it

Seven columns — and the two that matter are measured.

Door, Room, Wall kind, Face found, Placed, Hosted, Notes. Hosted is taken from the model after a regeneration, never from the placer's opinion — and where the two disagreed, the notes say so, because that disagreement is exactly the bug the probe exists to catch. Verdicts speak plainly: “hosted on the door's own wall” — or hosted on a face that is not the door's wall at all.

New to Revit: the placement claim, cross-examined by the model itself.
BIMIO · Sign — sign every door with the room it opens ontoBIMIO
Sign — face probe
This model has 24 doors. The probe measures the first 10 doors of the active view — or of the whole model, if the view holds none — and reports, door by door, what it actually managed to do.
Sign family and type
Door Sign — Room Name · 150 × 150
Only work-plane-based families are listed. A sign is hosted on a wall face, and no other placement type can be.
Leave the placed signs in the modelDoors to probe−  10  +
DoorRoomWall kindFace foundPlacedHostedNotes
M_Single-Flush 0915 x 2134mm1.04 “Meeting Room”BasicYesYesYeshosted on the door's own wall
M_Single-Flush 0915 x 2134mm1.10 “Office”BasicYesYesNothe placer reported this hosted; measured after a regeneration, it is not
M_Double-Flush 1830 x 2134mm1.20 “Hall”CurtainNoNoNonot solved: not attempted — there is no wall face to mount on
Probed the active view “A101 — Ground Floor Plan” — 8/10 placed and hosted, 1 placed but not hosted, 0 refused, 1 not solved. Nothing was left in the model.
ReloadCopy reportRun probe
Carry it away

The report is text, so it travels.

Copy report puts the full plain-text report on the clipboard — headed “BIMIO Sign — face probe”, with the question it answered and the counts — the artefact you send to whoever owns the family, pasted straight into the issue or the email. No file to find, no viewer to install.

New to Revit: the evidence for a family fix, one paste away.
BIMIO Sign — face probe (clipboard)
8/10 placed and hosted
placed AND verified hosted on the wall face8
placed but NOT hosted1
!never solved1

Prove the family before the floor bets on it.

Sign ships on the Data panel of the BIMIO tab. Aim the probe at your own sign family and read the measured verdicts. Revit 2024–2027, full trial, no card.

← PreviousRosetta