I have started using ISM so my company can have Revit/RAM interoperability. Currently using Revit 2018.2 with ISM plugin installed and Bentley's RAM Structural Enterprise suite. We have, for the most part, a good grasp on how this system works. One of the major issues we have come across is that the joists that transfer from Revit to RAM are not sized in RAM in any way. We select the correct ISM section tables (SJI and AISC) when creating a repository and everything looks like it will transfer successfully when viewing the structure in the ISM Viewer before we accept all changes and insert it into RAM. When opening up in RAM, we get a warning message saying "Section not set: mapping not found" and gives us a list of element ID's that we assume are the joists. Once opened in RAM, we select to show all sizes and all we get is the W flange beam sizes being called out, but no joist sizes. However, when we go to the 3D view in RAM, we can still tell that they are joists because they are colored dark blue. When we select a joist to see it's info through Beam Show Mode, we get a message at the bottom of the description that says "Joist will be selected or designated by RAM Steel." It is not until we designate a size in RAM that we can see its beam tag show up in RAM. Once a size is set in RAM, however, we can successfully transfer that change back into Revit by accepting that change through ISM.
Bottom line, we don't understand why the joist sizes don't transfer over from Revit into RAM even though the ISM program and RAM still sees them as joists. When creating a repository in Revit, everything seems to match up with its ISM counterpart, even the joists since steel beams and joists just use Table Mapping and all you have to do is select the SJI and AISC tables. ISM actually retains the specific joist size before transferring the model into RAM, and even when transferring from RAM back into Revit - the ISM program shows us its original size and also the new size that was designated in RAM.
Is this how ISM is supposed to work when starting in Revit and transferring to RAM, or are we missing a section mapping step? I have not been able to find anything on this subject in Bentley Communities which troubles me because I would have thought that others would have this same issue.