Titleblock properties

When working in Revit it is important to understand the difference between sheets and title blocks. Sheets are the actual views that exist in the Project Browser. Whereas title blocks are the families that are placed on the sheet. These two elements behave differently and have different parameters associated to them.

Once a sheet list has been created, it is possible to see all the parameters associated with the sheets. This includes various instance parameters such as ‘Drawn By’ or ‘Approved By’. These parameters can be individually updated within the Sheet List or exported to BIMlink if you need to make batch changes.

Revit_Sheet schedule

Often however, the title block family that resides on the sheet will have its own instance parameters which control the visibility of key plans, north point, scale bars, etc. The problem therefore arises that none of the title block’s parameters are visible within the Sheet List. Since title blocks can’t be scheduled, this means that in order to adjust any instance parameters on a title block, you need to navigate to each individual sheet, select the title block, and then modify its attributes in the Properties pallet. If you have a large amount of title blocks to update, this can become very time consuming. Of course, it is always possible to convert these instance parameters to type parameters within the title block family itself but this isn’t always desirable.


Sheet instance properties

Title block instance properties

To solve this problem, one can generate a simple Dynamo script as illustrated below. The script first collects all the title block families loaded into the project and returns its ‘Sheet Number’. The title blocks are then alphabetically sorted and filtered based on the ‘Sheet Number’ parameter. In the example below, the script is collecting just the title blocks where the ‘Sheet Number’ parameter beginning with ‘A’. This corresponds to our ‘Introductory’ drawing series. The script then collects certain instance parameters associated with those title blocks, namely,  ‘Graphic Scale’, ‘Project North’, and ‘True North’. These visibility parameters can then be updated by toggling between ‘True’ or ‘False’ in the Boolean node. This will update the instance parameters across multiple title blocks instantaneously saving much manual labour.



6 Comments on “Titleblock properties

  1. Hi, this seems like a great tool, but I can’t get the “List.SortSynchronously” custom node to work.

    • Hi Kiki. I recently depreciated the ‘list.SortSynchronously’ node as the OOTB Dynamo node ‘List.SortByKey’ does the same thing. Note however that the input is reversed. List = OtherList, keys = ListToBeSorted. Does that help?

  2. Hello Paul,
    Very cool thanks for sharing. I’ll stall them to change “For Submittal to For Construction” for spool drawing.

  3. Hi, i’m trying to build about the same as above. want to use this to get a parameter out of a tilteblock and to get that value to set on instance parameter on another Family.

    (Want a keyplan that automatical will chance plan region. Building A in Sheet name turning on a hatch in keyplan part building A) got 7 plans, and 20 times the sheets to do it on)

    • Hi Bene

      Sorry for the late reply. Yes this is indeed possible. I’ve used it for marketing plans where you have one apartment per sheet and the visibility instance parameters of the key plan are automatically turned on/off. But this is part of the Dynamo Package tools which is a paid service:


      Let me know if you need any additional information.

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