Updating Drainage structures with to match baseline reference?

Good Day Dustin:

There are two primary items in play in your question:

1. Tie the node top elevation to the corridor (or surface or corridor element) It appears from your screen capture that you have done this. The elevation is ruled to surface Merged Detour Existing Terrain.  So, if this terrain changes then the elevation will update.  Note: The terrain is in turn likely ruled to your corridor, so after making any change to the corridor you need to open the file containing the terrain (assuming it is in a separate dgn) so the terrain gets a chance to update.
2. Location of the structure - could be done by one of the following
   1. Civil Accudraw could be used for station offset constraint.  This does not seem to exist, which thus is perhaps your difficulty.  Make sure that when placing the node that both station and offset are locked or else the sta-off rule is not persisted.  Having said that, I have noticed in the version that you are using that sometimes the Civil Accudraw rules get lost even though you did everything correctly. (this is improved in 2021 R2)
   2. Snap - for example you could snap to a vertex on the ditch line.  I don't do this very often because of the way snap rules are persisted. Internally a snap rule is persisted as "vertex x on line y" since the count of vertices can change, such snap rules are questionable unless you are snapping to either the first or the last vertex.  

Not sure any of that helps since it sort of regurgitates what I perceive you have already tried.  

Hi Dustin, 

Have you tried the "Place Nodes" Tool (it's to the right of the place node tool). This tool allows you to place nodes at an interval along a line.  But it can also be used to drop a single node as well. 

 I just tried it and it appears to do what you are looking for.   When you click on the tool it will ask you to "select reference element for node location".  I clicked on the outside edge of pavement in my corridor.   It will then ask you to "select reference element for node elevation", so I again clicked on the outside edge of pavement in my corridor.  For the interval, I just put in a big number, as I was just looking to place a single inlet.   For the start station, I put in the location that I wanted the inlet to be at, the stop station i just moved my cursor a couple feet away and clicked, and it dropped the inlet at the start station I wanted. 

I then went into my corridor reference file, and added a new point control to widen out the edge of shoulder.  I then refreshed the corridor reference in my drainage file, and viola, the inlet moved with the edge of pavement line. 

See the attached picture. 

yes to all of that.  thanks for letting me know its improved in the latest release, I'm currently asking when our department will upgrade because there are a lot of these issues.

I'll try opening and updating the relevant terrains as they appeared to propogate but you know how appearances can be deceptive. i find it odd that some update and others do not even though i set them both the same way. i suppose for now i will just need to get used to redoing them.

Question is your corridor model in the same file or is it a reference? the place node command managed to update 1 structure but not the other on my end.

oh you are on Release 2 so it might just be more functional in your version as Robert said

My corridor model is in a different file.  I have a separate drainage file.  I referenced the corridor file into the drainage file when using the place nodes tool in order to select the feature line.

Yes I’m on release 2