[ORD 2018R4] Most Efficient Way to Annotate Same Civil Feature Multiple Ways

Good Afternoon,

We've been fine tuning our desired Annotation Definitions and Groups for plan and profiles. We have determined that we will require alignments that are able to be stationed on top of a tick mark, being stationed both right to left and left to right. Additionally, we have different annotation requirements based on whether we are in our regular plan views, or a particular detail, such as structure, intersection or interchange. To satisfy that requirement, we could, theoretically, add all required annotation definitions into a single annotation group, creating a different level and element template for each required annotation group. We would prefer, obviously, to have a different annotation set to toggle depending on what view/plan/detail we were in. 

Right now, we can accomplish this switching of annotation via changing the Feature Definition. Unfortunately, we can only have one Feature Definition per feature, and therefore only one Annotation Group. Ideally, we could accomplish this by either overriding the Feature Definition or Annotation Group, similar to the "Override Feature Symbology" property when looking at the Element Information for a Terrain Model. We would then annotate our baselines outside of the baseline container file. Without such a method, we have developed a somewhat laborious workaround.

1) Maintain baseline in its own file. We annotate this baseline and profile within this file using our default plan/profile annotation. Plan, using Element Annotation; Profile, using Model Annotation and the Named Boundary Civil Tools.

2) Create a new file for each desirable alternate annotation. We contain these alternate files within subfolders of our "Geometry" folder.

3) Create a new Feature Definition for each type of Annotation Group desired. Create the associated Feature Symbologies, Feature Definitions, Annotation Groups, and Annotation Definitions. Create associated new containers for each.

4) In each "alternative annotation" file, use the "Single Offset Entire Element" Horizontal Geometry tool to copy plan and profile into the "alternative annotation" file with 0 offset.. This also creates a Civil Rule with the new baseline married to the original baseline in time and space.

5) Set new Feature Definition corresponding to alternate Annotation Group.

6) Use the "Start Station" tool in the Modify Horizontal Geometry tool group to create equivalence. It would be useful if there was an option to copy the Start Station properties of the target baseline in the Horizontal Geometry offset tools. At this point, if we have to modify the baseline, we are able to update our "alternative annotation" files as soon as we open them. I would probably then create a Batch Process to open all of our files prior to plotting to update the properties.

The laborious part of this is that we have several dozen alignments to update every time we have a design modification, or if someone wants to see our annotation represented differently.

If anyone has any tips to streamline this workflow, please feel free to let me know! Thanks in advance as always.