Lou,
I attended the Moving to Open Roads session at BE 2012. And have been going over it. I have also looked at the PDF from that page in your link.
While both are good, they cannot tell you why an XIN, when linked does not appear to work as well as the book examples. (Also, is there a data set that can be downloaded for that PDF? I have the Transitioning Data set.)
I have another thread going where I discuss linked XIN issues. What I found, is that there are two locations where there are listings of features in the XIN and from my own experience with multiple firms and multiple XIN files from multiple sources is that the software is not keeping these lists synchronized. And I believe these lists are one of the causes or symptoms of linked XIN files missing and/or ignoring features.
We have always used a single XIN for survey and design not only because that is how most of our clients work, but when a designer uses a survey surface, the last thing you want is a new surface feature to exist in the survey XIN that has failed to make it into the design XIN. (I also fought hard for a single set of INI & FWF files in the pre-XIN days for the same reason.)
However, I also do not think the Moving to Open Roads document spends enough time on survey issues. And the Best Practices document also cannot go deep enough into detail. The Survey portion of our XIN file is extensive and has many features and 99.9% use custom codes and Attribute information to generate 99% of any labeling needed. I was a key contributor to the development of this XIN as we pushed the local DOT to migrate from an ICS based topographic mapping process to an InRoads Survey based process. If you go to MD SHA's website and download their workspace, you can see some of what I am working with. The reason I say some, is that their XIN file has a major flaw - almost none of the survey features are defined as surface feature. So while you can push a Survey to a DTM, the resultant DTM is composed of features with Styles assigned to them that do not exist in an XIN file. So linking the XIN file to OpenRoads is problematic. I have spent hours correcting this, trying to get something that works for InRoads Survey and InRoads as well as linked for Open Roads. It was this task that has prompted some of my other threads.
Please review these other threads and see if you can answer some of their questions. Also, let me know if you would like me to email my version of their XIN file to you. To see everything, you will need that workspace for all of its cells and linestyles and DGNLIB's, etc.
