Select all Elements on Level "X" which overlap shapes on Level Y

I'm not sure what qualifies as "find elements".  If you are hoping to use primitive tools this should work.

1) Place fence by element > click on your "Obscured Area" shape.

2) Turn off your "Obscured Area" level.

3) Change fence type to Overlap.

4) Do whatever . . .

The elements overlapping the fence are effectively identified.  You can copy them, move them, change color or whatever else by checking the "Use Fence" box in the tool settings dialog.

Thanks for the reply.

For "find elements" I'm basically referring to any way to identify them... mark them as selected, place marker elements @ locations, whatever.

I think I understand what your outline is attempting, but that would work only on a single "Obscured Area" at a time, correct?

I have, perhaps 400 obscured areas scattered throughout the map, many are quite small, so if I need to select each Obscured Area individually it wouldn't be much different than me panning through the map and visually inspecting them (as I currently am doing.)  Out of these 400 areas, I have around 20 that contain breaklines overlapping the areas... If I could quickly identify those locations all at once, it would save me the manual visual inspection of ~380 areas and I could concentrate solely on problem areas.

(I've also somewhat simplified the task, hoping for ideas.... in reality this single "breakline" level is actually several different levels. I'd love to query all at once).... so the basic logic would be:

  IF [Shapes on Level "Obscured Area"] OVERLAP [Elements on Levels ("breakline", "road", "water", "parking")]  THEN  select elements

Thanks again for taking the time to assist.

As I sit here I can't think of a way to do this that does not require a bit of custom programming.  It would be relatively easy to build in VBA but it would be a bit much to explain in a forum thread if you don't already have a solid foundation in MVBA.  Feel free to contact me directly and depending on your timeline I can help you more directly.

I think you can accomplish this with Data Cleanup. I would first freeze all levels except those that you are concerned with finding overlaps (you may need to do this several times, once for each level). Then open Data Cleanup (<Utilities <Data Cleanup) and under the General Tab check on Create Backup (always a good idea) & Save Flags in File (adjust the flag size by experimenting). Set Duplicates & Gaps to -none-, but set Overlaps to Flag. Go to the Overlaps tab and  set anything there that will be relevant (read Help file for explanations). Then click Apply. This will add Flags to all overlapping elements.

You may be able to set the Overlaps to Interactive on the General Tab. This should navigate to each overlapping  element, but the process may stop when you switch tools to modify or check an element. Also if you leave the overlap intact and you restart the process it will continually find the same overlaps.

The first method you can delete the flags as you go so you know whether you already looked at a certain area.

very easy to do in GIS .. but maybe in mstn project Explorer you could write the equation to find by element otherwise use the clean up tool to find overlaps by levels...