I was told that Civil 3D does not accept alphanumeric point numbers. True or false? We have BMs that we want to plot. The input to Civil 3D would come directly from a text file.
I don??t know. ?ÿIt might be the specific cad operator??s particular resistance, maybe for good reason. ?ÿThere are many ways to accomplish goals with cad if you work together.
Half true. The default point import styles only accepts numbers, ?ÿut you can edit one of these styles to accept "Name" for the point number and it will take Alphanumeric points.
You can also a create point group, edit the point label to show the description only.
If you don't want to mess with user-defined custom imports and/or using point names rather than numbers, simply open the file in Excel, move the BM name column to the description column, and generate throwaway point numbers for each one in column A. Display the description in C3D, and you're all good.
@rover83?ÿ
What we're trying to do, besides plotting the BMs in CAD, is to have a master county BM list available on each FC-5000. We want to save the list as a job file in MAGNET Field. We can then use the map feature. Our county BMs always begin with a letter, which is the first letter of the last name of the party chief who set it. This is followed by a seven-digit number. A fictitious example would be S-1065-015, where S is for Smith, 1065 is the run number, and 015 is the turn number. The guy who is working on this is removing the letter and the hyphens. Even with the letter removed, each BM will still have a unique identity. The only conflict we have is that our NGS BMs have a unique, three-letter identifier in addition to a number. Therefore, we need to use alphanumeric point numbers. We would like to put the full name of each county BM in the description field of a MAGNET Field point list. The master county BM list is being created in Notepad. We do have all county BMs on an Excel spread sheet stored on a county server. I suppose if we were adept at Excel VBA, we could strip the letter and hyphens from every county BM and use Excel to convert it into a CSV file for import into MAGNET Field.
My advice:
Discuss the ideas of how what where why whom.
Use a white board.
Don't use a spreadsheet.
Build a database and hire someone who knows what building a database is.
Often we humans are trying to do what a database can do by avoiding it.
My recent Surveyor had some great ideas of how we could name our points and tie them to users and equipment etc.
Except we were doing it all manually into the data collection device and it was and is a sh$t show.
List the ideas and think about how the decisions today will be used or not in the future, and look to design something that can be easily carried forward to newer technically sophisticated devices and reporting tools.
Sorry. I have suffered data trauma for too long, and I had a beer too. ??§
What we're trying to do, besides plotting the BMs in CAD, is to have a master county BM list available on each FC-5000.
That's a handy thing to have. I do the same thing for DOT and city monuments.
Back to the original question.?ÿ All C3D points have a number but can also have a name.?ÿ The point number is a numeric value but the name can be alpha numeric.?ÿ All you really need to do is set up a point format file to use 'Name' instead of 'Pt No.'.?ÿ If the import coordinate does not have a number, C3D will assign it one based on you setting.?ÿ You can also import a point specifying both name and number.
You can use either name or number in C3D routines.?ÿ When you want to export the data you just need to use a point format file that exports the point name and not the number.