Utility Records

Utility Records capture the buried and interior networks on a site — water, sewer, storm, gas, electric, comms — as an attributed, audited as-built record you can see in 3D and hand off in CAD/GIS formats. Everything lives in the Utilities tab of a project. It's a Crew feature.

A record has two kinds of entities:

• Runs — linear utilities (a pipe, a conduit, a duct bank) drawn as a vertex-to-vertex line with a diameter.
• Structures — point features (a manhole, catch basin, valve, vault, hydrant) placed at a single position.

Both are stored in projected meters internally, the same canonical frame as your survey points, and both are immutable snapshots: the geometry is frozen at capture, so a delivered record reproduces even if the underlying survey points are later edited or deleted.

Utility types & APWA colors

Every run and structure is tagged with a type from the built-in APWA catalog (American Public Works Association uniform color code). The type sets the display color everywhere — inventory, 3D scene, and exports:

Pick the type when you create the entity; it drives the color and groups the item in the inventory. Structure types (manhole, valve, hydrant, vault…) render as solids; linear types render as tubes sized to their diameter.

Capturing utilities

There are two ways to build a record.

Digitize in-app

From the Utilities tab, use the full-width button group — New run, New structure, or Import.

1. New run — pick an APWA type, then build the line vertex by vertex. Snap to existing survey-point markers in the 3D scene to capture their exact projected coordinates (the vertex keeps a soft link to the source point), or type northing / easting / elevation directly. A run needs at least two vertices.
2. New structure — pick a type and place it by snapping a survey point or entering coordinates.
3. Fill in the attributes (below) and save.

Because vertices are snapshotted, deleting the source survey point later leaves the utility geometry intact — the link is simply cleared.

Import from CAD / GIS

Import brings in pre-drawn linework:

1. Upload a DXF or GeoJSON file.
2. Groundtie parses it and shows every layer with a suggested APWA type, auto-mapped from APWA layer names (structure keywords win over linear ones). Confirm or change each layer's type; unmapped layers are skipped and counted.
3. Set the coordinate space and unit the file is in, then commit. DXF polylines become runs and block inserts become structures; GeoJSON LineStrings become runs and Points become structures.

Imported entities are attributable exactly like digitized ones.

Attributes

Runs and structures carry typed attributes plus free-form tags:

• Diameter — entered in inches, stored in meters; drives the tube radius in 3D.
• Inverts — the up-stream and down-stream invert elevations on a run (and per-pipe inverts on a structure).
• Slope — derived automatically from the two inverts and the run length; not entered by hand.
• Length — derived from the vertex geometry (3D where elevations exist, else 2D).
• Material, owner, condition, install / as-built date, locate method, and source — provenance for the record.
• Level — a tag for interior/floor-based utilities (see below).
• Tags and a free-form attribute bag for anything the schema doesn't name.

Every create, edit, and delete is written to a per-entity audit log, so the record is traceable.

Reading depth in the 3D scene

Utilities render at their true elevation, which means buried runs sit below the terrain surface. Two Display-menu controls make them legible:

• Utilities — toggles the whole network on and off (fades in and out).
• Underground mode — fades the terrain surface down to a low opacity so the buried network shows through, and fades it back when you turn it off.

Click any run or structure in the scene to select it and see its attribute card (label · kind · type). Runs are drawn as diameter-sized tubes and structures as cylinder solids, all in their APWA color, so a glance reads both the network layout and relative pipe sizes.

Interior utilities & levels

Utilities aren't only buried. Use the level attribute to tag interior or floor-based runs and structures (e.g. a mechanical-room riser or a roof drain). The level travels with the entity through the inventory, the scene, and every export, so an interior network stays distinguishable from the site network.

Inventory

The inventory is a searchable, server-paginated table — modeled on the survey points table — so a large network stays manageable:

• Search by label or tag, and filter by type; both run server-side.
• The Type column shows an APWA color dot; the Item column shows the label with a subtitle (run point count, length, and diameter for runs).
• Click a row to focus it; delete from the row's action column.

Exporting

The export button (top-right of the inventory, icon-only with a tooltip) writes the current inventory — honoring the active search and type filters — to a portable format:

• GeoJSON — geometry plus the full attribute set.
• DXF — 3D polylines on APWA-named layers, with structures as nodes.
• LandXML — plan features and points (weak support — see caveat below).
• PDF — a formatted utility schedule with a branded cover, an architectural plan sheet of the network, and dual-unit (meters and US survey feet) tables. See Utility Schedule PDF for how to read it.

LandXML caveat: LandXML has no first-class model for arbitrary utility runs, so the export maps them to plan features / points on a best-effort basis. Use GeoJSON or DXF when you need full-fidelity geometry and attributes.

Utility runs, structures, and their vertices — along with your as-built comparisons and any uploaded DXFs — are also included in the project export/import archive, so a whole project round-trips with its utilities intact.