When it comes to site surveys, point codes are worth their weight in gold. This is because they allow you to group the survey points into traverses based on their codes. Once the points are grouped into traverses, they can be sorted to the nearest neighbor, included in a drawing, etc.. You can think of these traverses as layers with feature lines and symbols. You can put all the points with the 'CL' code into a center line traverse, then plot that traverse with the line type, symbols, colors, etc that you want to indicate a center line.
To sort points by codes, choose Tools | Sort Points Into Traverses By Codes from the Point Codes Manager. TPC will display the Sort dialog, allowing you to specify the options you want. From this dialog, you can choose to sort just the selected codes, the tagged codes or all the codes. You can also choose to update the survey point descriptions, adding the code descriptions (i.e. 'CL' becomes 'CL Center Line') or replacing codes with their descriptions (i.e. 'CL HWY126' becomes 'Center Line HWY 126').
TPC combines the code and the description to form the traverse name when it creates a new traverse for a point code (i.e. 'CL' creates the traverse 'CL - Center Line'). This makes it easy to identify which traverse contains which codes.
Example Traverse Names
CL - Center Line
SW - Side Walk
CB - Catch Basins
When sorting points in to traverses based on their point codes, you can further control which traverse points are placed in through the use of Aliases. When you specify an Alias, point are placed in the point code traverse corresponding to the Alias instead of the traverse corresponding to the code.
Here is an example
Code Description Alias
SW Sidewalk
SW1 Sidewalk SW
SW2 Sidewalk SW
When these three codes are sorted into traverses, only one traverse is created for the SW code. Points with the SW1 and SW2 are also added to the SW code traverse because of their Aliases. In addition, the SW1 and SW2 codes do not create corresponding traverses since no points would be sorted into them.
Aliases are handy when you want to place more than one type of utility into a single ‘Utility’ traverse. Doing so allows you to easily turn utilities on or off in a drawing and export them to a utilities layer when writing a DWG file.
Each traverse that is created, receives it's Traverse Settings from the code that created it.
Point Codes ManagerF="point_codes.htm">Point Codes
Selecting Data
Sort Points by Code dialog
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