One of the tasks that falls on my shoulders is making it easier for our users to work with multiple client standards. This frequently involves XIN files as we are an InRoads shop. Recently, as clients provide "revised" XIN files, I am finding it harder and harder to keep the software optimized as many of these agencies XIN files are incomplete and worse, have erroneous settings.
My tool of choice in dealing with analyzing and evaluating XIN files is the XML Reports and the ability to export them to Excel for further analysis.. To that end, starting with some of the feature table reports, I have created a family of reports that highlight specific areas within the XIN. The majority of my efforts fall within the feature styles and named symbologies. In effect, I can isolate information to quickly determine a number of important settings in the XIN that can make an XIN useful or not.
Once I open an XIN in the report browser, I usually start with the Survey & Surface areas. What I am finding is that many of the large clients have not made the connection between Surface Styles and Survey Styles. And as I work with the XIN files, I can see some areas where this broken connection is not helped by the settings of the XIN.
For example, while Surface Features in a DTM have a direct correlation to Survey Features in a Survey - Breakline, Random, Interior, DNC, etc. When you look at an XIN file, in the surface settings - its only focus is symbology. Under Surface, there are only two leafs - Settings and Symbology. Settings is all about what type of display you want to "allow" and Symbology is where you control the symbology of the displays. Nowhere is there any indication as to what type of feature these might represent.
Yes, it mentions 3-D/Plan Display for Line Segments, Points and Annotation, but we sometimes use the points of a linear collected object for elevation, but do not use the linear portion as breaklines. This disconnect" can usually be seen very quickly via the Feature Manager dialog box. Turn on the checkboxes in the Show Style with Properties groupbox for Include Surface and Include Survey. See how many Survey Features are missing. Then un-check Include Surface and click on the Surface Named Symbology column header to sort the features on that field. See how many blanks there are. Or how many Default's there are. And even if the symbology is assigned, frequently, the Settings area is incorrectly defined - points set to only display line segments and linear features only set to display points. (If you need an example XIN, send me a message and I can point you to a few DOT sites. I'd rather not "out" them in the open forum.)
Another example of this disconnect, is if you look at a surface that was created via import from graphics. Frequently users will import everything as the correct feature type, but they will all share the display settings of the feature style that is the first one on the list, alphabetically. If you have ever tried to use a surface edit tool on such a surface, you know how the highlighted features often appear a jumbled mess as point features get highlighted using a linear display. Or when a linear feature doesn't seem to highlight at all as it was using a point display style.
And now, with Open Roads, we need element templates - many of the symbologies we need are a;ready in our XIN - but only a handful were defined as components. For most of us, only the symbologies used for cross section/typical section linework were defined as components. All of the items that were at most, represented by crossing breakline points were not defined as components. Additionally, many named symbologies were setup like GEOPAK D&C manager "drafting standards". Things like contours and their labels, DTM triangles and perimeters. These settings were not features at all, but drafting related displays for surface properties.
But the tools for exporting to element templates only look at components within features.
Back in the days of two INI files and an FWD, I found that you could generate named symbologies for the civil.ini from a wysiwyg.ini using the feature table to preference tool. And you could create a wysiwyg.ini file from a survey.fwd feature table. And I just happened to have a spreadsheet that could write an FWD from rows and columns of data in a spreadsheet. So to bulk load a civil.ini with named symbologies, I took symbology settings we had in various standards and brought them into my spreadsheet - this was for proposed features - edge of roads, storm drain graphics, even cross section and profile grids and borders. From this I wrote a dummy FWD file, which I opened as a dummy wysiwyg.ini before finally using the feature table to preference tool. The result was a bunch of named symbologies ready to be used without spending hours and hours in the product's various dialog boxes.
I'm guessing that we all might need to make some dummy components and write some element template xml files from them.
Or I might have to dust off my old spreadsheet, revise some VBA code and start cranking out element template xml file right from Excel.
Any thoughts or comments, anyone?