Does anyone know of a way to completely delete and replace an entire alignment without causing civil labels to "zero out" (break)? I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to achieve this. Obviously it isn't ideal to have to replace an alignment after labels have been placed (because cross sections and sheets no longer fall on the correct stations, but that is out of the question for now).
For example, if we receive a new alignment from our surveyor, our normal process is to open the alignment file, delete the alignment, and re-import it. It seems that civil labels don't care about feature definition names and instead rely on the element ID (or some other internal ID that isn't user-readable). I have tried to append elements to the alignment geometry, but I have found this is unreliable when the alignment was generated from "dumb" lines and arcs (i.e., not ruled horizontal geometry). Other times when the alignment was using civil-ruled geometry, adding new elements in also causes the element ID to update, therefore breaking the labels anyway.
It causes many hours or sometimes days of re-work to have to delete the now-broken labels and place new ones at the same locations. Perhaps an enhancement could be added in the next release to add the ability to re-associate a label to an alignment and re-associate the leader line to the text portion of the label?
Besides this glaring issue, I have found that civil labels are as good (or better in some ways) as GEOPAK plan labels at this point.
Deleting and replacing alignments should be avoided at all costs. This can cause a lot of problems. There are several solutions to try:
Regards,
Zane Pratt
Civil Designer
Geometry substitute
Pick new geometry first then old.
"Simplify" is great if I only need to modify an arc radius, length, or tangent bearing and length. Doesn't seem to break labels regardless of what scenario I tested. However, this does not allow me to insert new elements, obviously.
Geometry Substitute unfortunately broke my labels during my testing.
For Geometry Builder Edit: I could only get it to work SOMETIMES. I.e., if I insert a completely new element (tangent or arc), the labels break. However, if I merely modify an existing element using the tabular values, the labels do not break.
Hi Jesse,
If you are re-importing your alignment and it has the same name, technically ORD should change the alignment to the new geometry and keep all relationships alive. If it was originally imported from LandXML, etc.it keeps the link to its import source and if an alignment with the same name is imported again the horizontal and vertical geometry should get updated.
Instead of deleting it, try reimporting it (making sure the name is the same in the source file) and see if that works.
Mark
OpenRoads Designer 2022 R3 (10.12) | Microstation 2023 | ProjectWise CE 3.4
Maybe I am missing an option somewhere, but when I import an alignment with the same name (and feature definition), it simply increments the feature name to the next available number.