I have a chronic issue in several projects, in several corridors. Almost every time i try to use point controls to tie a corridor to another corridor, or to tie a corridor into existing ground, the control is rejected as a "circular dependency". Some times I can get it to work by deleting a line and redrawing it, or deleting a corridor and redoing to template drop. Locking profiles, removing rules etc. will sometimes solve the problem. Some times there seems to be no way to solve the issue. This happens very regularly, I have everything i can think of, there seems to be no good way to consistently use pojnt controls.
What are some best preacticies that would help me avoid circular dependencies?
It will happen when you add keyin station, point control, end condition exception, parametric constraint, template drop with snapping to any of corridor object (eg. edges of pavement). Design Intent tries to rememeber a rule but the rule depends on corridor results. Software should not create design intent rule when it would create circular dependency. It will also happen not only with snapping to corridor object - you will see this behaviour when you use Civil Accudraw with coridor elements as refeneces or orgins. I believe it was fixed in SS4. You can now snap to corridor object and it will remember only the station/offset and not the rule.
This is NOT fixed in SS4. I'm using the current ORD and found this post after giving up trying to solve myself. Manually typing in the stations worked great, clicking on beginning and end of corridor got me the circular dependency error that I pulled my hair out for the last two days.
In ORD, they very first thing you should do after the program finishes opening is disable the persist snaps icon on the feature definition toolbar. The snap persist rule is almost always the cause of this issue as well as file corruption issues.