pjc,
Here is a snippet from my Advanced InRoads book on this topic. I did this on InRoads SS2, and haven't checked it for SS3, SS4 or ORD yet.
Current Template Drops & Color-coding - Near the bottom of the Template Drops dialog box is the list area titled Current Template Drops. This lists the information on each template and its location along the corridor path. There are several pieces of information presented in this window including Station, Interval, Template, Revised In, and Library. In most simple models there would be nothing noteworthy to mention here but in more complex models this list window can reveal some interesting details of the corridor construction.
The Station column will always be sorted from the lowest station to the highest station. This won’t ever change, and if you added another station midway into the model it would fall at the appropriate place in this list. When a Station entry is colored red that means that it can’t find that station along the alignment associated with that corridor. This can occur if the alignment length is revised in such a way as to make certain stations unavailable. (Usually when the alignment length is shortened.)
TIP: If you change the beginning station of the alignment using the Stationing command found under the Horizontal Curve Set tools, the station defined in the Template Drops dialog box in the Roadway Designer will also change accordingly.
The Interval is feeding back how often it will model that particular section as it moves toward the next section in the list. Note that when a section is edited in the Roadway Designer that edit is a ‘one off’ and is shown in this dialog box as a Single Station in the Interval column. This will give you some insight into which station cross sections have been edited in the corridor model.
The column titled Template indicates the name of the template that was dropped at that station. These template names are usually black but will become blue or red as an indicator of something that has changed.
To be very honest here, this color-coding is a bit tricky because of the different variations and combinations of using multiple ITLs along with the different types of IRD template edits. But don’t get too hung up on it because in the long run the color is simply your indicator that things are not exactly as they were, when the corridor was originally created.
So here we go into the color-coding.
The Template name will turn blue if the source of that particular template isn’t the active Template Library currently loaded into the software. It will also become blue if that template is edited in the Roadway Designer cross section view. This will be accompanied by an Interval notation that it is a Single Station. Any sections that have been edited in the Roadway Designer cross section window will be colored blue since they only exist in the IRD and not in the ITL.
The Template will be colored red if the template in the ITL is somehow different than the template in the IRD. But only if the ITL that the template originally came from is the library that is currently open. (The template will always appear blue if the ITL file that is open was not the original source library for that template.) A red template can mean a few different things. It can mean that a template was dropped from the ITL into the IRD and then later changed in the ITL. Or it can mean that a template was dropped from the ITL into the IRD and then edited in the IRD. (Now this type of edit is not a Single Station cross section edit that is indicated by a blue color.) This means that the template drop was edited right here in the Template Drops dialog box. We’ll refer to this as a ‘global edit’. In order to fully understand this you have to grasp how the IRD really works; and this will be talked about in a moment.
So to summarize this color-coding another way, the Template will be blue if it has been changed in the IRD by a single cross section edit or if that template cannot be found in the active Template Library. It will turn red if it has been changed in either the ITL or ‘globally’ edited in the IRD. Both colors indicate that a change or edit has occurred somewhere.
The Revised In column is a little misleading because it implies that something has been edited. This is not really always true and you have to look at this column with some thoughtful insight. First, this column is telling you where that template was created in its current form. In many cases it will indicate the ITL. This will be true for any templates that were initially dropped into the IRD to form a model. But there is more to simply taking a template from the ITL and always using it ‘as-is’. In some cases you may want to ‘start’ with a template in the ITL and then ‘tweak’ it a bit for your corridor; and not just at a single section or single station. Whenever a template is ‘globally edited’ in the Roadway Designer this column will indicate that fact by an IRD in this column.
The color-coding on the Revised In column will be black in all cases unless the Template in that particular row did not come from the active Template Library currently opened in InRoads. In this case, it will be showing as red.
This should help a little : )