How many times does this happen to you? You experience a situation, then shortly after the situation you gain some meta awareness and decide it needs a name. This is how a lot of "jargon" must be created.
For me it came after a consultation on a Revit behavior. I thought, "This needs to be called Software Archeology." It's a good metaphor and one I used earlier in an post discussing the Cutoff property.
Well it turns out, like my idea for the Slinky, someone already thought of it! A quick Google search reveals the wikipedia reference.
The definition: includes the reverse engineering of software modules, and the application of a variety of tools and processes for extracting and understanding program structure and recovering design information.
I and other former Reviteers often get questions as to why Revit behaves a certain way. Some common answer patterns are "Because of this early important customer", "Because of this highly influential former leader", "Because the feature hasn't been touched in X releases", "There is no reason that I can recall..sorry".
In this case the behavior had to do with old and specifically coded dimension sketch behavior. If you dimension to references outside the sketch (say walls while in a floor sketch) the dimension will "fall out of the sketch" when you exit the sketch. They will behave as if they were created outside of sketch mode. Why? I suspect that having such dimensions live in the sketch caused issues. If a user moved a constrained wall but the constraint lived in a sketch how would they know? Constraint visibility is a well known issue in the Family Editor. This is my theory anyways. I'm sure code documentation is a popular topic covered elsewhere in the ether.
_erik
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On the topic of archeology, in that roof cutoff article's comments you never did explain the other method for creating a mansard roof, apart from by mass face, or using two separate roofs (which makes an ugly join in section)...
Posted by: Tom | October 03, 2011 at 10:47 AM
There are many other ways for sure. I did cover shape editing: http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/02/shape-editing.html
Each method has advantages and disadvantages but I can look to cover them in a future post.
Posted by: Erik Egbertson | October 03, 2011 at 11:04 AM
Nice. I was just doing some "digging" of my own today. Here is a good one that I found: Create a camera view. In the bottom left View Scale menu you notice the scale is replaced with the word "Perspective." Well, have you ever tried changing to, say, 1" = 20' ? That is not a very useful view scale ;) Even better, click "Custom" and you will notice the default scale is 1:0 (huh?) OK, now try changing it to 1:1 (lines get thicker, but not unreadable.) OK, now I want to go back to that default view scale. Try entering 1:0 into Custom, and it reverts back to 1:1... its a black hole!
Posted by: Tom Vollaro | October 04, 2011 at 08:57 PM