In looking for some other information, I stumbled upon a post I made in the Beta forum on Linking Codes. What I see now is many of my linking code issues from that post was due to this "Linking code not permitted within feature code enhancement."
IMHO, this "feature" is not desirable for many users. At the very least, we need something like the Variable Manager from InRoads where we can disable this "feature" and restore traditional InRoads parsing if alpha codes and control codes.
Without that, you will be hard pressed to retire InRoads Survey in favor of OpenRoads Civil Survey.
That and the ability to create the same InRoads Survey XML Report that is currently part of InRoads Survey.
I understand that after certain edits, the original data is probably no longer relevant, but I would not be surprised to see certain clients dictate that we are not permitted to use some of these edit tools for that reason.
As you move forward, I am often pleased to see that some posters are DOT members. Unfortunately, in todays climate, many DOT's do not see the benefits of having that level of involvement in new product developments. I do not believe that our DOT has anyone who has ever posted on these forums and would be surprised if any have participated in any Beta processes as well.
I can attest to the fact that when I left the DOT over twenty years ago, that level of involvement left with me. After more than seven years away, I had a chance to return under a consultant contract and they were not doing anything differently then, than they had been when I left.It was as though I had been away only a few days, except many faces were different. They still lack full integration of survey features as surface features - while a survey feature is saved as a DTM feature, they do not assign any surface attributes to the feature. In the Style manager, if you turn on the filter checkbox for both survey and surface features, only a handful of features will remain in the list. This makes it very difficult to use existing DTM features with proposed features when trying to tie exiting and proposed designs together. This tells me that they are not using a huge portion of InRoads in production. And such omissions hampers their consultants when working for them, too.
I will be willing to bet that when many of these organizations look into these new versions, there will be a lot of push-back.