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G! tools, facilitating the use of Bentley Map

TRANSLATION NOTES: Please read some comments at the end of this post.

A few days ago I started a development on .NET, with which I hope to settle the Bentley Map’s limitation with its Geospatial Administrator. For this, I caught an old pupil with which we began to egeomate with xfm when he came out from the Comal(*); tasting a good cappuccino and an amaretto we’ve found the changes that have been implemented from V8i in the “Bentley Map Fundamentals” and “Bentley Map Administrator“.

Why

This is simple, Bentley wants to be a CAD making GIS, and despite having a good acceptance in cadastral projects, it must break the barrier that common users have when they are first faced with Bentley Map. An ESRI user, Manifold or AutoCAD Map, who wants to do a project on its own, buy the package with regional distributor and after a while after reading the manual gives account that doesn’t know where to start.

So for these, comes G! Tools for Bentley Map, a solution that I hope to have ready in a couple of months and that will run on PowerMap, so that it should be possible to jump-start a project in Bentley Map, without using the Geospatial Administrator. One of the attractions is that it would bring a categories template project, created layers, properties, and an example of a municipality with which the user decides to take, dispose of or create a new one. For now I show you a clip_image001preview:

What is the intention

The idea is for the initial part, a wizard that allows from a project template, from the side of the map, structure that requires without going to Geospatial Administrator. Something as well as do from ArcMap what is done in the ArcCatalog, so that building as layers constitutes a structure xml list to operate and connecting to external data.

For this I’ve defined five tabs which I refer in this example:

Overview: Here you select the project name, seed file and external data connections. This creates an xml schema and a user workspace, such as: Assistant Assessor, who will use only a series of layers and not all that, would be seen by the department head.

Categories: In this panel, you can select from a list of predefined categories, those of interest for example cadastral, hydrograph, Roads and Administrative. It’s also possible to create new ones.

Classes (features): From the categories chosen, you can select those classes that will involve, for example:

From the cadastral category, it will only be chosen the blocks and buildings layer; from the hydrographic category only the rivers axes and creeks; from the roads layer, streets axes and from the administrative category, neighborhoods, districts, sites, and urban perimeter.

Class properties: Here, taking into account the selected classes, you can define or modify specific properties of each class, for example:

The buildings class: orange line, yellow fill, transparency 50%, with attribute and cadastral endorsement key, this same as primary key, photographs route and connected via ODBC to the avaluocat table of a MySQL database and with deployment of columns, class, quality, pricing, etc.

The urban perimeter class: coffee line, light brown fill, thickness: 2, attributes: year of adoption, area, perimeter, year of projection, public restrictions. The restrictions associated with a combo type domain and with hyperlink to a document.

It is just an example, finally, what we should have will be categories, classes and properties ready to build data. It would only occupy time to select what will be work in the buildings layer, draw the object and at the end raise the form to enter the key valuation. Just build it!

Then, when you query the object, I’d get up the building properties that exist at the indicated columns in the attached table, the link to attached photos, etc.

clip_image002What more

For now I’m entertained with the wizard, but it would be sought to combine those GIS functions bring with Bentley Map and develop some that are not so practical. Without forgetting what Geographics made and remains necessary, such as transferring, removing or putting attributes, update area / perimeter to the xml, connect to Google Earth, attribute’s display…

It is curious that as I work, I realize that Bentley thought everything when it implemented xml on the dgn V8, a great smoke since 2004, issues expected to be resolved in the Be Together to which I don’t know if I can attend because the formal invitation arrived at a disadvantage. Then it has been implemented to Bentley Map practically what any GIS user occupies, unfortunately not in the functional logic of a non-specialist user or that comes from another brand of software.

The challenge is interesting, I tell you there.

TRANSLATION NOTES:

(*) out of the Comal: Is used to say when something is just released.

One comment

  1. Jens Rückriem

    Würde dieses Tool gern testen.

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