Hey guys - I'm working for a civil company working primarily with water. I'm new to this work, so I'm going to spell things out a little because I don't know all the lingo yet
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OVERVIEW
I'm creating a plan and profile for a ~7 mile long pipeline. This requires creating an alignment in profile view with lots of annotations noting turns, air release valves, and other features along the pipeline. These annotations must include the station number the annotation is referring to, for example "ARV Sta. 10+00". In profile view I need to create a polyline of the ground level as well as a pipeline drawn >4 feet below the ground. This pipeline must include many of the same annotations - but my boss likes some of them placed on the grid itself where the polylines are drawn and other annotations outside of the grid. OK, I'll show you a couple simplified pics:
PLAN VIEW
PROFILE VIEW
PROBLEM
I drew the route, and now my boss wants me to make a couple minor changes in how the pipeline is laid out!! Little does he know this could take hours of tedious changes in every annotation (keep in mind 7 miles of this stuff and the whole profile view being shifted and changed). Kind of a boring project to be honest (although there's a lot more to it).
SOLUTION?
1. I want to automate as much of the correction process as possible for future use. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if something's already out there. So I thought I could write a LISP that automatically updates the station number of moved annotations based on the distance of the annotation along the polyline. I think this could be done by blocking the annotations and creating attributes that update themselves based on the distance of the block's insertion, the leader, from the start of the alignment. Of course, the insertion point of the block would need to be on the line.
2. Write a LISP that reads in data from an excel file and then creates the polyline and annotations at fixed stations above the grid in profile view. Excel columns needed: elevations with corresponding station numbers (2 columns) and station numbers of annotations (several columns). Even just creating the polyline from an excel file would be cool.
HELP?
Any better ideas?? I have thought out a little bit of code which I'll post later, but it would be really great if the LISP experts could help me out with it - I've never written an entire LISP before. Maybe I'll post in the LISP forum then.
Happy fourth! :dood:
