AutoCAD Map/FDO – Spatial Query

seen on Neal’s blog – CAD and GIS Integration

GIS-data is in general on a complete other scale available than CAD-users need for their projects. Importing that GIS-dataset into a CAD-environment gives an overkill.
When talking with AutoCAD Map or Civil users about connecting to GIS-data using FDO-technology, they reject because it is still to much data.

For example an AutoCAD Civil 3D user has to develop a terrain-model and calculate volumes for a new housing construction area.
It would be very usefull to add the soil-layer from GIS, but not the whole province or municipality, only limited to the area needed for the project.

This is possible by adding a Spatial Query – by rectangle or polygon – when connecting to the data.

Spatial Query
The Spatial Query functionality is available in the Data Connect user interface.

AutoCAD Map/FDO ESRI ArcSDE vs AutoCAD Map/FDO Oracle Spatial

AutoCAD Map/FDO <=> ESRI ArcSDE
Before AutoCAD Map can make an FDO-connection into ESRI ArcSDE server, there have to be 3 so called DLL’s ( pe.dll, sde.dll and sg.dll ) copied into the “AutoCAD Map software”/FDO/bin-folder.

Using “Map Display Manager => Data => Connect to Data” to add an ArcSDE connection in the Data Connect UI. In this connection screen the server name and instance needs to be entered and after that the username/password of a registered ArcSDE-user.

Map will research, with the ArcSDE-credentials of that user, which feature-tables are available and analyse those tables to determine the correct structure. Note: if the ArcSDE-user has full access to the database, than this analyse will take longer – take care that the user has restricted credentials only for the desired tables for a better performance.

After this analyse the list with available features will be displayed and the user can select one or mutiple tables to connect to the Map-session. Next the data is displayed, with the option to filter on location and/or attributes.

AutoCAD Map/FDO <=> Oracle Spatial
Before AutoCAD Map can make an FDO-connecton into an Oracle 9i or 10g Spatial server, there have to be an Oracle 10g Client ( or an Instant Client ) installed on the Map-machine. Besides that Map needs Oracle Workspace Manager to be installed on the Oracle server – this is used for Long Transactions and Versioning.

Using “Map Display Manager => Data => Connect to Data” to add an Oracle connection in the Data Connect UI. In this connection screen the service name needs to be entered and after that the username/password of a registered Oracle-user.

Map will search by default for FDO-schema’s ( tables with FDO-metadata ) and display these in the DataStore overview. Map can analyse also schema’s without FDO-metadata en determine the structure ( comparable with the description above for ArcSDE ).

After this the list with available features will be displayed and the user can select one or mutiple tables to connect to the Map-session. Next the data is displayed, with the option to filter on location and/or attributes.

see also: Direct access to Spatial Data using FDO-technology

ArcGIS for AutoCAD vs AutoCAD Map/FDO

ArcGIS for AutoCADArcGIS for AutoCAD is a free of charge downloadable plugin from ESRI, currently available for AutoCAD 2007, 2008 and 2009.
With this functionality AutoCAD users have access to the ArcGIS Server Map Services and the desired map will be shown as an image behind the CAD-data.
The styling of the map is done by the server and the user can get info about the GIS-attributes.
This functionality is view only and doesn’t allow editting of the ArcGIS-data by AutoCAD.

AutoCAD Map/FDO is functionality to connect directly to for example an ESRI ArcSDE server and is available for AutoCAD Map 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010.
With this functionality AutoCAD Map users can make a selection of the GIS-feature classes they would like to connect to in their CAD-environment. These are not displayed as an image, but as vector data. That makes it possible to “snap” to them in drawing mode.
The styling of the map can be done by using AutoCAD Map Display Manager. The GIS-attributes are available in a so called Data Table, where you can select a record to highlight the corresponding object in the map ( and vise versa ).
This functionality allows you also to edit the ArcGIS-data by AutoCAD Map.

see also: Direct access to Spatial Data using FDO-technology