Revit Not Allow Unknown Groups of Shared Parameters in SPF but Still Associates It

It was known that Revit does not allow unknown groups of Shared Parameters in SPF at all, but would still associate the bad SPF with itself. 

Here is such a SPF.

# This is a Revit shared parameter file.
# Do not edit manually.
*META VERSION MINVERSION
META 2 1
*GROUP ID NAME
GROUP 1 Common
*PARAM GUID NAME DATATYPE DATACATEGORY GROUP VISIBLE USERMODIFIABLE
PARAM 1584c449-d2d8-45fe-9d0b-a7b6e871a172 Angle ANGLE 1 1 1
PARAM 4e341c7d-f68d-4d4f-b18f-b7f24da1f501 URL ANGLE 1 1 1
PARAM c74a8a89-6b3a-400d-b16a-8d9a371eae4b Material MATERIAL 1 1 1
PARAM 40de520d-8373-4156-bf58-dc9337a12adc Yes/No YESNO 2 1 1

In that way, users cannot use those old good shared parameters in the previously associated SPF anymore and the newly associated SPF becomes null now, as follows.

It looks pretty weird to reasonable people that Revit allows shared parameters with bad GUID to be loaded and even bounded, as introduced in the previous post, but would totally halt on the minor group issue.  In fact, when a shared parameter is bound with a project parameter, the group name in the SPF of the shared parameter does not play any real role.  That is, this kind of unknown group name issues should be ignored, instead. 

Lucky enough, Revit SPF Editor can open the SPF, mark the parameter with unknown group as an issue, and highlight the data row as brown, as follows.

And better, the opened SPF can be saved right away by SPF Editor.  After that, Revit would be happy and can load all parameters from the SPF including the Unknown group one, as follows.

And much better, the default Unknown group name assigned by SPF Editor can be changed to something else more proper such as Group #1, and the whole SPF can be saved again, as follows.

If the Examiner button is clicked at this moment, the SPF Editor will report nothing wrong anymore and the Issues label will report zero or right disappear.

Therefore, it looks a good idea to open a SPF first with Revit SPF Editor and examine all shared parameters inside it with the Examiner button.  If any issues, big or small, allowable or not by Revit itself, we should make changes, save the SPF, and then associate the SPF with Revit either with its Edit Shared Parameters dialog or with the SPF-Revit Application Connector command of Revit Parameter Organizer.

By the way, all the above were done in Revit 2019, the latest version!