Hello all,I am new to the InRoads world, as well the Be Forum. I'm in the midst of trying to get a grasp on setting up Styles and Preferences for InRoads V8i, and would appreciate the communities' perspective on the subject. I have found some information on various posts as well as figuring out a bit on my own. Here is my newbie understanding. Let me know if I am off base or whether you have any other input.Styles and Preferences are stored in xin files. In general, it is probably best to start out with a pre-existing xin file and then modify it for your needs. Various US Department of Transportation (DOTs) agencies may be good sources for xin preference files (such as the Colorado DOT xin file that I have been looking at). Additions or modifications can be made through various dialog boxes within InRoads and then Saved as a Preference; copied from one xin file to another through the Tools > Applications Add-Ins > Copy Preferences Add-In; carefully modified through a xml code editor such as Notepad++ with the XML Tools plug-in; or possibly by using software from other vendors such as Envisioncad. The Styles and Preferences determine a wide variety of things including text attributes, leader types, line styles, feature levels, symbology, and I am sure many more things. Some InRoads dialog boxes provide for fairly straightforward interactive creation of preferences like the View Geometry Stationing dialog box, while others do not seem to provide enough detail to really set all the attributes that you might want for a given feature. The Tools > Preference Manager can be used to centrally manage preferences.
From what I can tell developing your own Preference File can be quite an undertaking, and potentially very cryptic in nature.
Do folks actually develop xin files from scratch? Are there any other InRoads tools that are applicable to developing preferences?
Your input is appreciated.
Thanks,Gavin
Excellent tip #1:
Unknown said:These should be experimented with on copies until you know exactly how they work.
In fact, if you download a DOT XIN file, the first thing I would do is make an exact copy, and just rename it to <anything> and set aside the original file to keep it intact. This way, you can "destroy" your practice file all you want.
Excellent tip #2:
Unknown said:Another thing to keep in mind is that the named symbologies defined in an xin tie to the MicroStation environment. If you adopt a DOT standard as your starting point you will also have to adopt their levels, cell libraries, fonts and/or text styles and custom linestyles or make mass edits to these standard resource calls to match your standards. HTH, Ron
HTH, Ron
Good point!
It's basically like learning anything else; it just takes practice and repetitions. At times, I still find myself going in circles with it.
I just found out that my frequent crashes in InRoads are apparently being caused by some anomaly that has crept int my XIN file.
At Bentley's suggestion, I am running Roadway Designer using the default XIN file and changing back to mine when I need to display the results.
Charles (Chuck) Rheault CADD Manager
MDOT State Highway Administration
Hey all, this is a very interesting thread to say the least. I wanted to chime in on the crashes you are sometimes experiencing when making surfaces. I wanted to let you know it appears we have an issue that is sometimes occurring during the model building process. I was able to reproduce this and have logged a ticket for our programmers to look at. This was in the SELECTseries 2 Refresh version 08.11.07.494. I noticed during my debugging I could disable Horizontal Chord Height tolerances and this seemed to help significantly. None the less we currently have this finding in the backlog. I would anticipate our next release for the SELECTseries 2 version will have this problem addressed.
Gavin,
Excellent post! You should add it to my Blog post on Names, Names and More Names
communities.bentley.com/.../thoughts-on-names-within-inroads-please-add-your-own-thoughts.aspx
In case you were unaware, the XML Reports (Report Browser) can also report on XIN files. As delivered, there are only a few that do:
However, these can serve as jumping off points for other reports.It takes some efforts to learn, bet modifying XSL Stylesheets is a skill worth mastering.
Of these, the best starting point is LevelFromCode.xsl - make sure it is one of the newer versions - earlier ones contained an error that caused some items to be missing that should have appeared. It starts at a Feature Style and bores down into Named Symbologies and their attributes. With it, you can get a list of styles, the named symbologies used by the styles and the actual symbologies used by the named symbologies. I have been able to create a bunch of reports that I use to review XIN files.
This is from MD SHA's Survey Features - it lists the linework symbology, To keep things manageable, I have three reports (cells, text and linework)
Alpha Code
Feature
Description
Feature Type
Named Symbology
Display Settings
Linear Elements
Lines
Layer Name
CO
WT
Line Style
ABRR
Ex. CL Abandoned Railroad Track
Line
TO_ABRR
RAIL-BRKL
14
1
4
ABUT
Ex. Abutment, Edge
TO_ABUT
BRDG-ABUT
7
0
3
APPLE
TREE
Ex. Tree, Deciduous
Point
TO_TREE
VEGE-WOOD
2
AXLE
Ex. Property Axle
TO_AXLE
PROP-MARK
11
BC
Ex. Curb (Bottom)
TO_BC
ROAD-EDGE
BCD
Ex. Concrete Ditch (Bottom)
TO_BCD
STRM-DTCH
BD
Ex. Ditch (Bottom)
TO_BD
9
6
BELV
Ex. Basement Elevation
TO_BELV
SITE-ELEV
BHCMP
PINVQ
Ex. 84" Storm Pipe
TO_PINVQ
STRM-PIPE
ex84pipe
BHRCP
BLDG
Ex. Building
TO_BLDG
BLDG-LINE
Caddcop,
Glad you enjoyed it.
No, I had not gotten into the XML Reports as of yet, so thanks for adding that to the discussion. I see the
FeatureStyles.xsl, MissingNamedSymbologies.xsl, and NamedSymbologiesUse.xsl listed under the XIN folder and LevelFromCode.xsl under the Survey folder when going into View XML Reports. Having the report functionality can definitely help in keeping track of things, as well as troubleshooting disconnects.
Are you creating or modifying your own xsl report documents with Notepad++? I also noticed that there are a couple files called "Creating ASCII Output Style Sheets.pdf" and "Creating XML Lookup Table Style Sheets.pdf" that are located in the folder with all the xsl report documents ("C:\Program Files\Bentley\InRoads Group V8.11\XML Data\en" on my Windows XP installation), which seem to give some basic guidelines are creating your own reports.
I checked your blog out. Good stuff!! I will add the process outlined above to your blog. Although, I am not really prepared to build too much upon the Naming topic, as I don't really have a compelling reason to do so at this time, other than maybe my own personal interest. The subject of setting up Preferences in InRoads seems to be a very integral part of fully utilizing the software and providing for user efficiency, and therefore an important subject to thoroughly focus on.
Gavin
Chuck,
Thanks for the update. I received a "cleaned up" xin from support the other day, but when I tried to use it, the crashes still occurred. And as a side note, I have been a proponent of normally spaced template drops - 50', 25' and occasionally 12.5' while using the chord tolerance settings to densify as needed. But on this project, there was little horizontal or vertical curvature, so I have those checkboxes toggled off and am manually increasing template drops in areas where curb changes are frequent. So even with them off, I am still getting pretty regular crashes.
How does the 12.5 template drop work? I have been looking for a way to get the 25' station drop but I dropped at 5' but 12.5 may save some work.
My crashes have happened when creating a surface with a 25' drop and the template consisting of 1 subgrade component and 2 end conditions or when I have the interchange with everything you can throw into a ird used.