Working with Joints

Does anyone have any handy tricks or hints for working with releases?

A difficult example I have come across was for a roof with a load of curved ribs. These are pinned at each end to an edge beam.

I have to break the curved beam down into segments in order to have straight lines for analysis but then I want the joint to be the start of beam 0 and the end of beam X. 

Another example would be where a secondary beam spans onto a primary. The primary is pinned at each end but must be split such that the secondary may intersect. Again we therefore need a pin joint at the start of beam 0 and the end of beam 1. An additional complexity is knowing which way around the beam is running.

Are there any easy tricks people have found for doing this?