Parcel Functionality Question - sort of

[_Hathaway]

Question on Parcels.  Our typical workflow in the past has been to create base drawings, consisting of linework such as property lines, right of way, easements, etc... for areas that may encompass an area as large as a single small town.  Thus creating one master drawing in which all survey determined linework is kept, this keeps all survey determined data in one drawing and one source.  I want to avoid the scenario of having multiple drawings with slightly different linework because a change was made in one but not all.

In the past(LDD) we would xref this master drawing into our record of survey drawing or plat drawing, label things up appropriately (via label by points or similar command, and never ever by dynamic label).

We are struggling with proper workflow in Civil3D under this scenario.  It seems like with the new implementation of Sites and a seemingly better working Parcel Manager there should be some way to make this work using these features. I was thinking something along the lines of creating the parcels within the master drawing and then importing them into the record of survey or plat drawing but it seems there is no way to efficiently accomplish this.  I cannot tell how Autodesk intends this to work.  We want one source for survey determined linework to be able to link to all aspects of a project.

I can see one scenario where we do it the same way we always have and simply xref the master drawing into our ROS or Plat drawing and struggle to label things up without actually having lines in the drawing. I am hoping there is a better way.

How do others handle this?  Hopefully my questions and concerns were clear enough, it's often hard to put these things into words.

[Sinc]

As far as I can tell, Autodesk has no intended workflow for this.  This has been one of my pet rants ever since C3D 2007.

We've simply been managing as best we can, which means having linework in lots of different drawings, and dealing with all the ensuing problems.

Like you, we also have some base maps encompassing some rather large areas.  But that drawing contains nothing but a lot of dumb linework, with closed polylines for each subdivision.  Then whenever we need to work on a specific area, we create Parcels in our working drawing from the dumb linework in the base file.  Every C3D drawing that needs Parcels has its own set of live Parcels living in it.  And yes, it leads to problems when we have changes, and need to change multiple drawings.  But there is no way to data reference or otherwise share Parcels in C3D.

[acoursen]

Now I haven't done this in a while and it was for only one project, but I utilized labeling of xrefed parcels and it worked pretty well.  Any changes to the master parcel plan is reflected and updated in subsequent plans utilizing the master parcel plan.  

[Sinc]

We haven't found that to work well at all.

The biggest problem is that the base file can be edited, and there is no feedback to let the user know if/when they edit linework that has been labeled through an XREF.  We would have a problem that we'd need to edit the base file, then sometime later we'd go to print some drawing, and all the XREF labels would be gone.  This can be minimized by never using multi-segment polylines, but that's at the cost of not being able to use multi-segment polylines.

It is also impossible to change styling for parcels that have been XREF'd.

It's a nasty mess, and has been since the first version of C3D.  There are some other fundamental problems with Parcels, too.  I have some pretty lengthy rants on the subject that can be found by searching this newsgroup.

[acoursen]

Oh yes, I've read your rants.  Yea and I know it's not perfect, but in my one man show your issue with lack of feedback did not occur, but I could see that being somewhat of a problem.  But losing labels, thats another thing. I went through the horrors of 2007 so I've been there.  

Sure enough I just went back to the drawing where I had done the xref parcel labeling and I've lost all the lot line labels, getting this message:AECC_PARCEL_SEGMENT_LABEL [1CE29], Broken reference, Remove.  Joy.  Never mind.

[civ_engineer]

It still removes labels and gives the broken reference error in Civil 2012 SP2.1 as well.

It makes you wonder why we bother with the tool.

[Jeff_M]

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@civ_engineer wrote:

It still removes labels and gives the broken reference error in Civil 2012 SP2.1 as well.

It makes you wonder why we bother with the tool.

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The only time I ever see the broken reference is when I delete an object that was labeled through an xref. As long as the entities keep their Handles, and the Xref does not get moved/rotated or unreferenced, all my labels stay intact. 

[civ_engineer]

I don't know what I'm doing wrong then.  I can't take a chance on losing the work we do, so I'm going old school. I'm still labeling through the xref but I'm just labeling the lines with parcel turned off.  When I label the parcels the labels are removed on the next drawing load.