Rotate Survey Cells

There is this wiki on the topic: (17) Video: Using VBA to Rotate Cells for Points in OpenRoads Survey - OpenRoads | OpenSite Wiki - OpenRoads | OpenSite - Bentley Communities

What if you do not have a "line" within the "survey" for the VBA to rotate the cells? For instance, I have a line, it just wasn't part of the survey, or created in the survey.

In Survey, you can associate a macro with certain survey features and the SmartObjects.mvba project has example macros that accomplish automatic rotation. We used those examples to create our own versions, but within the delivered examples, are ones that scan for a near linear feature as a guide to rotation.

We use JPT codes to draw a line from a GUY to a utility pole. I've seen plenty pf surveys where there were multiple utility poles within the area that without a JPT drawn line, you would not know which pole to use as the alignment angle.

We did have to tweak some of the codes to address an issue when the cell being rotated was coincidental with the line. When the line is only in proximity to the cell, the code would calculate the correct angle but sometimes the code would return a zero angle. We had to project a point at distance along the line to correctly calculate the angle in all situations.

As for rotating a sign, the macro can look for an edge or road and align the cell to be perpendicular to the road. We do that with lane markings - like arrows and words. They look for a lane striping figure and align them to that.

When done in this manner, there is very little post processing manipulations required. The only downside is that processing is slower.

We also use it to generate some automatic labels.

I do wish that some of these were built into the feature definition, like they were in InRoads Survey. But others were never possible and always required manual edits after the fact. So we feel like we get more out of OpenRoads than we did previously.

I have never in my entire career received a survey in Bentley products. Any survey within Bentley came from me personally importing points that did not have the appropriate Bentley survey coding required to link the points together (ie draw lines). Having this only work with a Bentley Survey line is a complete joke in my opinion...

What about drawing a line and having the symbols rotate? Importing lines drawn from something like Carlson, or other surveying software and have the points rotate to a line within this? What about the clients that only use Bentley Survey to place Cells at points to cut down drafting? I know I am not alone here.....

I've worked at three firms (20+ years) and the DOT (20+years) and they all used Bentley (or Intergraph before that) software to process surveys.

Two of the firms used both MicroStation and AutoCAD and all of our surveys were processed in InRoads and if we were delivering a survey for AutoCAD, we created PNEZD files and LandXML DTM's from it to bring into LDD or Civil 3D. When Civil 3D 2010 or 2011 introduced the capability to use multiple codes on a single shot and also include begin, PC, PT control codes, we configured it to match InRoads coding and were getting blocks and feature lines in Civil 3D and features and cells in InRoads from the same crews using the same codes.

While InRoads Survey and Open Roads Survey are not identical, they can accept 90+% of the same input and get very similar and useful results.

Setting up survey in Civil 3D was way more cumbersome than either InRoads or Open Roads. We had to buy 3rd party software to assist  streamlining those efforts. With InRoads and Open Roads, between the tools Bentley provided and Excel, we could streamline many areas with no other software.

I apologize for coming off harsher than I wanted Chuck. For DOTs, Bentley is, I am sure Great.

I got no issues with your post. I just wanted to point out that in my career, I spent 20+ years working for firm using InRoads Survey no matter who the client was and what was the CAD platform deliverables. And while OpenRoads Survey is not identical, it can be configured to be nearly so and does have some capabilities that InRoads did not.

And when working with LDD with AutoCAD, we could never get its linework capabilities to work. It was only in Civil3D’s 5th or 6th major release that it began to compare with InRoads Survey.

That’s not to say that I don’t think things could work better or should be a built in feature, but even though Survey was not even part of the first few releases, we can us what we have in production. I cannot make the same claim for the rest of the program. But even part of that blame falls on us. We do not have the resources devoted to the development of our workspace.

Just don’t get me started on plat and property work. Our plats department is hungry for the tools they need.

Grab a DOT workspace and experiment with their codes and workflows. It’s a way to see what is possible without spending too much time setting up everything from scratch.

in the InRoads world, we used to sometimes get a client XIN file and we would redefine its codes to match our codes and meet the CAD standards expected. You could use the migration tools to modify a DOT’s dgnlib to match your standards in a similar manner.

I got no issues with your post. I just wanted to point out that in my career, I spent 20+ years working for firm using InRoads Survey no matter who the client was and what was the CAD platform deliverables. And while OpenRoads Survey is not identical, it can be configured to be nearly so and does have some capabilities that InRoads did not.

And when working with LDD with AutoCAD, we could never get its linework capabilities to work. It was only in Civil3D’s 5th or 6th major release that it began to compare with InRoads Survey.

That’s not to say that I don’t think things could work better or should be a built in feature, but even though Survey was not even part of the first few releases, we can us what we have in production. I cannot make the same claim for the rest of the program. But even part of that blame falls on us. We do not have the resources devoted to the development of our workspace.

Just don’t get me started on plat and property work. Our plats department is hungry for the tools they need.

Grab a DOT workspace and experiment with their codes and workflows. It’s a way to see what is possible without spending too much time setting up everything from scratch.

in the InRoads world, we used to sometimes get a client XIN file and we would redefine its codes to match our codes and meet the CAD standards expected. You could use the migration tools to modify a DOT’s dgnlib to match your standards in a similar manner.