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The profile view for linestrings (accessible by selecting a linestring, right-clicking, and selecting "Profile Viewer") could stand to have some of the editing functionality available in the alignment profile view added to it.

• Option to display segment slope (I've seen this requested elsewhere on this forum)
• Grip editing of vertical nodes (both VPI's and the elevations on horizontal nodes) which would ideally include the ability to adjust vertical curve parameters graphically
• With "Edit Linestring" active, clicking on vertical nodes on the line's profile should select it for editing as it does in plan view (if I move my mouse down to the profile view, instead of handy node selection it just becomes a frustrating "not allowed" icon)

One scenario I encounter involves elevating linestrings that represent the IE of, say, a water pipe, to have a specific offset below a reference surface. This introduces far more nodes than desired as it places a VPI along the line everywhere it crosses a surface edge, and I manually have to weed these down. When I use profile view in its current form to identify local max/min elevations and decide which VPI's to eliminate, I have to zoom in and note the approximate station, then go find that node either in plan view or scroll through the list of VPI's in the "Edit Linestring" tool to find and then finally edit/delete it. I should be able to simply click the node I see in profile view and have it selected for editing/deletion through grips and in "Edit Linestring".

Another scenario involves matching a linestring's grade to a reference surface by manually best-fitting it, as for example in a FG surface tie-in to an existing ground topo. Not having the grip-edit functionality means I have to accomplish this in a roundabout way by identifying the nodes affected and selecting them in the "Edit Linestring" tool, either guess-and-checking the elevations or using the measure tool to estimate the distance to raise or lower the affected nodes by.

I realize that I can get some of this functionality by creating an alignment first and then using the alignment's profile view to make the desired edits, and then round-trip that back to a linestring when finished; but this is impractical when needing to edit multiple linestrings on the fly.

Stephen

You can do some of what you are asking today

1) In the Profile Viewer - you can right click and select Surfaces, and then select the surfaces that you want to slice along the line of the linestring. These then show up in the Profile Viewer in the same way that they show up in the Surface Slicer or Profile Viewer

2) n the profile viewer you can use Explore Object, and while snap indicators are not being displayed it does actually snap to points that you click on and displays their values in the explorer pane, you also get a real time read out of Station and Elevation of the cursor. The elevation readout is of the line selected for the profile. If you also open the coordinate scroll box, that will display you the Station and elevation of the cursor in the Profile view, so you can interpret elevations of the surfaces displayed as well as the elevation of the line you are profiling. The explore object will give you the instantaneous slope of the selected line.

When in the Profile Viewer when you have the Linestring Editor open, when you are in the Distance Along field you will get the correlation cursors in the Plan and Profile View which allow you to see a VPI in Profile and identify which one it is in the plan view. I agree that if a node is clicked in the Profile View it would be helpful if it would highlight in both plan and profile view so you know you have the right one. 

3) Because some nodes are Horizontal 3D nodes and some are VPIs you can use the linestring editor to Add nodes and move nodes in the profile view. Once a VPI is selected, you can type in a new value or click where you want the VPI to be in terms of either Station or Elevation (depends on which field is selected, this will move the VPI to where you want it

I agree that it would be good to do the following

1) Have Grips in the Profile Viewer

2) Have Snap indicators in the profile viewer

3) Have the ability to select a reference surface in Explore Object for Profile Viewer so you can query clearance / depth

4) Display Slopes of segments in profile viewer

5) Display line markings in Profile viewer to show elevations

6) Highlight the VPI or Alignment Points highlighted in plan view in the profile view so you can easily cross correlate - the little Bow Tie marker helps, but highlighting in both views would be better.

7) Drawing in Profile View and being able to create plot dynaviews from the Profile View

Note that when editing the profile of the line, if you want to set e.g. a VPI elevation to fall on the slope between the two adjacent VPIs you can do that in the linestring editor using the right click snaps, if you set e.g. the location type to be Incoming or outgoing slope

It would also be nice if you could use Station and elevation offset to a surface profile along the line to give you the depth or clearance that you need as an editor input in the linestring editor

To match grade in a profile, you need to set the Type of Elevation control to be by Incoming or outgoing slope and then you can use point to point snap to determine the slope from the surface profile to set your pipe profile

The videos below show you how these things can be used today

Hope these are helpful

Alan

Stephen

Here is the Smart Text Code that you can use to determine the clearance between a 3D line and a surface model. If you use the create text command, and then use this Smart Text string, it will ask you to select the line and the  surface. You can also enter additional items into the smart text to add an elevation to the line if you want to go from Invert to Top of Crown of pipe for example.

You don't actually have to place the text, you can just scroll along the line and it will give you a live readout of the depth etc. 

 Depth to Invert = @<ELS,L,F,2,T>@

Same with a Math addition

Depth to Invert = @<ELS,L,F,2,T|+1>@

Hopefully this is useful

Thanks for this tip Alan. I read about it sometime ago here on the forum but had since forgotten. I've struggled to gain a deeper functional understanding of the smart text code syntax because there aren't a lot of clues what the problem could be when it doesn't work; if I try a complicated expression and it doesn't work right away I usually just switch to a different approach to conserve time. All of these canned examples are very helpful in providing a base to experiment from.