I have a few questions:
1) In my personal experience with WaterCAD, when using the customer meter feature, "service lines" do not count against your software license pipe count unless you actually draw/import the service lines. The WaterCAD license I am currently using has a 5000 pipe limitation, and I've imported over 8000 customer meters with no problem. Personally I'm a huge fan of the Customer Meter feature - it saved me tons of time and effort.
I believe that if you actually create the meter service lines (which show up in a Pipe table) then those will count against your license limitation.
2) Again, in my experience WaterCAD will place the meters at the proper X,Y locations. I find it much more convenient to use State Plane coordinates rather than lat/long. I believe WaterCAD gives you the option of assigning meter demands to either "nearest pipe" or "nearest node". You can, of course, modify the placement of any customer meter connection.
3) I don't remember setting up the Thiessen polygon - perhaps WaterCAD does it automatically.
4) My experience using WaterCAD: I started with GIS shapefiles and imported them into WaterCAD. Then I cleaned up the pipe topography manually (pipe connections, crossing pipes, etc). Unless it's been changed in later versions, WaterCAD does not automatically change information in a shapefile - you must tell WaterCAD to generate a shapefile from the WaterCAD topology. And I do not believe that WaterCAD changes the GIS ID.
In any event I've found it very advantageous to make topology changes in WaterCAD, then export to shapefile for GIS use. This way you are assured that your system is always topologically correct. It's more work for you, but it's better than getting shapefiles from the GIS department that you then have to import, clean up, then export again.
I'm sure the forum moderators will be able to provide much more useful, complete answers.
Good luck.
1. Laterals do not count against the license. These can be used to help keep the number of pipes in the model lower. More information can be found here: Is there a criteria for selecting a pipe limit when purchasing WaterGEMS or WaterCAD? Inactive pipes do not count against the license either.
2. WaterCAD standalone does not use a coordinate system and latitude and longitude are not reported. If you use a Bing Maps background layer, you could get the latitude and longitude from there. See this link for more information: Reporting model element latitude and longitude.
The X and Y coordinates can differ based on how the model was created. If you used ModelBuilder or added a background before adding pipes manually, the X and Y coordinates will be based on the source file. As an example, if you have a shapefile and use ModelBuilder to build a model with this, the X and Y value for the end of a pipe will be the same as the value in the shapefile being used. If a model was built like this and you elevation data for TRex is in the same coordinate system in the GIS, the model and the elevation file will likely line up. If it doesn't, you may need to reproject the model or the source file.
3. Thiessen Polygons are generated automatically around nodes in the system. This is primarily used for some of the LoadBuilder methods. You can find more information on the properties of this in the Help documentation.
4. Since more than one element can have the same GIS-ID, you should be able to maintain this if you skeletonize the model. The following links have some information that may be useful:
Tips for improving performance of all-pipe models linked to a GIS
Keeping a Hydraulic Model in Sync with a GIS
When you are using ModelBuilder to build a model, you have options to use Label or GIS-ID as the key field as well. More information on this can be found at the following link: Using ModelBuilder to Import External Data.
Regards,
Scott