When one creates families in Revit, it is often the practice that families are nested. An example would include a chandelier where the lights would be arrayed on some fixture.

The lights need to have light sources, so they must be created as nested families. This allows the nested families to be rendered with their individual light sources. I have discovered the easiest way to represent them is by creating a family from the Metric Lighting Fixture family template. Depending on the situation, the parent family may be one of several types available in the family template library.

It does not even have to be a lighting fixture family, as the family type can always be changed later, and if a light source does not have to be present in the container, then it is no loss.

One of the tricks we use to schedule the electrical properties in connectors is by replacing the built-in Revit parameters with shared parameters.  A typical strategy would be to have a generic property representing a characteristic length, depth, and height.

The same strategy can be used to schedule the dimensions of nested families. The shared parameters are assigned to the family as shared instance reporting parameters. If one wants the nested families to schedule, they must be shared. A good example of this would be a table and bench in which the table and bench could be manufactured by different suppliers. One would then want to have the schedule ready at any time to present for tender.

While one can also easily place the components, individually as free-standing apart from their container family, one does need to recognize that they will not be type-driven, and it must therefore be taken that they are available in standard sizes that the manufacturer can supply.

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