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Geographics tools adapted in Bentley Map

For several days now I had been talking about BentleyMap, recently we considered the migration Of data and the possibility of automating the process, in this case we will show an example of customization tools Geographics had and that we needed when we started operating xfm.

Before Bentley Map came out, at the 2004 conference the xfm scheme was presented as an alternative to where they were walking although it did not sound as attractive as the Geospatial Administrator seemed so difficult as now. After seeing its functionalities, we had time to sit down and think how possible it was to integrate xfm without leaving Geographics and from there an interesting project was born that I will talk about in another moment. In this case, I want to focus on the first thing we did when the nostalgia for Geographics tools were nowhere to be seen in Bentley Map, we did it with programming recently graduated from the Catholic University and with a good command of .net.

Indispensable Geographics tools.

The problem with Bentley Map is that it left out some elementary functions of Geographics, which the user cannot find how to solve (not in a traditional way). If you look at them, they are basic, and hence a great weakness of Bentley Map, which lacks too simple conventions but other less robust tools have them and if it does, they are very hidden even from the users of its predecessor. Let's see what these were:

This video can be downloaded from geofumadas, the images below are taken from it. The development was on .net, the project was on Geographics 8.5 and the database was Oracle 9. Xfm bentley map

Features Management

This simple bar allowed to convert graphic objects of the dgn into elements associated to the project through the feature table, practical but Bentley Map did not bring anything about it, so we reconstructed it:

Selection of Feature choosing the category, type and feature, this solves what we did with utilities / feature manager.

Also the bottom button allows to make the selection of feature based on an object that already has and the other lXfm bentley mapTo assign the active feature to one or more elements.

Then in the lateral tab were placed the other tools to see the information of the feature and remove it, which are what we knew as atach and detach.

Subject resolved, except for priority change (which was never used), the 5 commands for handling features was solved.

Updating data

Xfm bentley map Always on the right panel, a button was placed to capture the geometry information, when selecting the object it raises a panel that allows you to choose what we want to update: area, perimeter, length or range of coordinates. This was done in Geographics with database / area-perimeter-coordinates update

And then a last button was made to transfer data between one object and another; It asks if the data is replaced.

 

Feature display

Regarding visualization, or what was called display manager in Geographics, a functionality for this was developed within the same application, almost as geographics did. Here they can watch the video.

Xfm bentley map

If you look at it, it's the list of categories, with their attributes and buttons to turn off, turn on, select or deselect everything. With an additional option to choose the view.

To my knowledge, this was one of the first implementation steps made on xfm, in 2005, less than a year after Bentley presented it at the 2004 conference in Orlando. Just now that Bentley Is doing the promotion Of its new tool by trying to get users to leave Geographics.

Do we conclude? While Bentley Map Allows you to develop over VBA and doing almost any personalization, what Bentley does by forgetting what his users are used to doing is not adequate. In our case, we had geofumados developers at this level, but it is not what an "out of box" software should promote if it wants to massify itself.

Golgi Alvarez

Writer, researcher, specialist in Land Management Models. He has participated in the conceptualization and implementation of models such as: National Property Administration System SINAP in Honduras, Management Model of Joint Municipalities in Honduras, Integrated Cadastre-Registry Management Model in Nicaragua, Territory Administration System SAT in Colombia . Editor of the Geofumadas knowledge blog since 2007 and creator of the AulaGEO Academy that includes more than 100 courses on GIS - CAD - BIM - Digital Twins topics.

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3 Comments

  1. When I go to Tools I do not get the Geographics option. I'm trying to export to kml

  2. It is possible that you are not using Geographics, only microstation.
    Another possibility is that Geographics is poorly installed.

  3. I do not get the Geographics option when I get into Tools. I'm trying to export to kml.

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