Archive for July 21st, 2006

The question has been posed - “Can I label my pipe invert elevation in the band set of a profile view.” That’s a pretty standard request, right? A lot of agencies require this on all Sanitary Sewer Plan/Profile sheets. So, naturally, I tried to set my band set profile reference to the pipe profile. Uh, there’s no pipe profile listed.

After some thinking, and a bit of cursing the team in Manchester (I still love ‘em, but the little things drive me crazy), I did come up with an answer. It’s not perfect, but it does work. There are two main downsides - 1) It requires the manual drawing of a new profile, and 2) It loses the dynamic link to the pipe network - but more about that at the end.

So, we’ve got this profile view - you can see that I have my existing ground, proposed finished ground, and pipe network profile all shown in the profile view. Here’s what it looks like - and the profile is just for illustrative purposes, because not many agencies here in the southeastern US would allow me to design a roller coaster like this:

Now, to get this pipe information in my band (the area at the bottom of the profile view that shows FG elevation and EG elevation….), I’ll need to create a new profile by layout. I’m going to call it “Pipe Profile,” give it a label style of “none” and draw it tangnet-tangent (no curves).

When I draw this profile in, I’m going to snap each PVI to the start and end invert of each pipe. Make sure you have a profile display style that will actually draw in the invert of the pipe (I simply have a style that shows inside walls only). You can see my profile here:

Now, to label this information, I’m going to go to my Profile View Properties, click on the Band Set tab, and change my Profile 2 setting for that band to my new “Pipe Profile” profile. Now, I’ve created a new label style that shows which one is the FG elevation and which one is the pipe invert elevation:

One problem though - there’s no way to keep the dynamic relationship with the pipe network. If I change the pipe network at this point, I’ve got to go back in and redefine that new profile that I created. It’s quite a bit of a PITA, but it’s better than the way we used to do it - calculating by hand and labeling manually. I personally hope that those great guys in Manchester can see fit to make this a bit more automatic in the future.

Have fun!