In TBC, the ability to create construction or staking models for road corridors has a low barrier to entry. Start with an alignment, name your corridor, build out the templates, and export to one of your favorite field survey softwares, Trimble Access or Trimble Siteworks, of course.
TBC can also support more complicated corridors with superelevations, lane transitions, and conditional instructions for templates. Some templates can be quite complex, with tens of instructions. After working through plan sets or design documents to key-in the template into TBC, did you know you can save the template for use in another road corridor in a different TBC project or copy or reference this template for use in any station along the corridor? No need to duplicate work you’ve already done! Here’s how:
Say you’ve keyed in the following template at Sta. 133+88:
And you’d like to use the same template in a different project or perhaps you’ve built up a library of common templates to reuse as needed. Note the Options button in the lower right corner, left-click it to expand the menu:
Then select the Save template as xml.
Pick a location to save the *.xml and your road corridor template is saved.
To load it into another project or corridor, when in the Insert Corridor Template command, select the drop-down arrow for Options:
And select From file definition. Browse to where your *.xml template is saved, click OK, and it will be imported as a new template into your corridor.
But there’s more… did you note there are three other options in the drop-down menu? The New definition is to key-in a template’s instructions from scratch, and the other two, Copy definition and Reference definition, let you utilize any template in the project for the new template you are inserting.
The differences? Copy definition uses the same instructions as the source template and creates a new, independent template that can be modified or changed without any impact on the source template. Reference definition uses the same instructions as the source template and links the new with the source. So, if the a template is referenced and a new instruction is added to new template, the new instruction is also added to the source template.
Leverage this knowledge and functionality in your next construction or survey staking road corridor project to save you drafting time!
TBC - Field to Finish with Confidence