GIS Exchange

Moving Next Door

Thanks for coming and reading this blog - it's been a great start.  Now that Map is part of the Infrastructure Suite, we thought it made sense to realign the blogs a little, so I'm going to start blogging over at http://beingcivil.typepad.com instead. If you want to skip the Civil stuff, you can either use the tab at the top, or go straight here.

Mapguide Tips

Jackie Ng over at the Mapguy(de) put together a nice post back in June with 5 handy Mapguide/ Map Server tips.  They are aimed at developers, but the first three (Firebug, Firefox, and Baretail) are good tools for anyone setting up a MapGuide or Map Server site to get a reallly good handle on what is happening behind the scenes.

Deployments of Civil 3D using localized Country Kits from Suites

The Civil 3D team put together this great post for those of you working with Civil (or Map in Civil).  Take a look if you are working with Suites in a language other than English.

Publish to Map Server errors - IIS upload limit

Getting a mystery error or undescribed failure when publishing to Map Server or MapGuide?  It could be that you are hitting IIS' default upload limit of 30 megabytes.  Now, that's a compressed 30 mb, so it likely won't happen unless you are pushing quite a lot across.

To change the limit:

1. Open the IIS Manager
2. In the main window, double click Request Filtering
3. Right click anywhere, and select Edit Feature Settings.
4. Change the Maximum Allowed Content to a larger value

No restart of IIS should be needed.

IPv6 and MapGuide/Map Server

Hashim and Cecilia put together a nice post regarding Mapguide/Map Server over at the Install and Licensing blog. It's worth taking a look for those of you working with Server 2008 installations, as it will save you quite a lot of licensing hassle when setting up.  You are likely to see this if you are installing on Windows 7 as well (though it's not a supported operating system).  Check it out!

Updates!

Map 3D 2011 Update 2 was released a few weeks ago, as was MapGuide Enterprise 2011 Update 2 for Windows and Linux.  Topobase 2011 just released Update 2 today for Client and Web.

 

Finally, we would be remiss to not mention that Map Server 2012 is now available for download from the Subscription Center for Linux (Red Hat) users.

On to the next chapter...

A quick update on the staffing of our GIS Exchange blog.  I have changed roles within Autodesk and am passing the baton to my GIS colleagues in Product Support here at Autodesk.  Nate Moore and Cecilia Fantini will be the new blog owners, and I can guarantee will bring you amazing tips and tricks about all of the Infrastructure trends and products Autodesk offers. 

I'll be sure to keep following their progress and cheering them on from the sidelines.

Thanks to all of you, the followers, for your attention and feedback over the past year. 

Well wishes and happy GISing!

Katie

Making your layout look more like a topo

To make your layout REALLY look like a map, a grid overlay helps a lot. So we're all on the same page, here's  an example topo (thanks USGS!):

Note all the handy tic marks and the grid overlay.

Out of the box, Map can do a grid for you too:

That's available under Layout Tools when the layout is active.  However, you can only pick one reference system - that of the map, LL, Military Grid, or US National Grid.  In this data set, I'd like to have the drawing Coordinate System (Massachusetts NAD83 State Plane Mainland) and LL shown.  That'll require a little more work.

1. Get your map set up, being sure to have the drawing coordinate system defined and the drawing saved.
2. Use DXFOUT to export a DXF of the drawing, then open that DXF in a text editor (I used Notepad++)
3. Search the file for gridstyle
4. Copy out most of that line - from <PrintLayoutElementStyle version="1.0.0" to </PrintLayoutElementStyle> into a new text file.
5. Save that new file in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\AutoCAD Map 3D 2012\R18.2 (on a Windows 7 system) as something like newgridtemplate.xml
6. Save your drawing, and close and reopen Map.
7. Open your drawing, go back to the layout and change the Grid and Graticule reference system to another of the desired options (like LL).
8. At the command line, enter MAPLOADGRIDSTYLE
9. Pick the new XML template you saved in step 5, select the viewport, pick append, then define the tic and gridline decision at the prompt.  Note that the UNITS setting at the time of insert will drive how many decimals you see. 

 

Selecting Create from the Ribbon again will clear your setting and let you start fresh in case you need to adjust your tic and gridline spacing.

 

You might notice that the XML code includes some color options - changing those from the current value (which should show as red) causes the append to fail.  Is that something that you would use?  Let us know in the comments!

 

UPDATE August 3:  You can change the color for a single grid layer.

1. Make a copy of a default grid defintion XML file. Edit the color references in there, being sure it has a different name.
2. In Map 3D, load the default grid definition via the Create button.
3. Now, load and append the editing grid definition via MAPLOADGRIDSTYLE - it will still appear black
4. Create a new grid via Create (or MAPLAYOUTREFERENCESYSTEM) for the same coordinate system you used above

 You should now see a new grid in the colors you defined in the edited grid definition.  To reset to black, go to Create and select Current Coordinate System.

Map Server 2012 on Windows 7

If you are trying to install Map Server 2012 on Windows 7 (which is not a supported operating system!), you might get some FastCGI errors.  Those mostly likely go back to when you installed the IIS components for Windows. Formerly, you could get away with a limited subset of Application Development Features, but with 2012, you'll need them all active, as shown here:

 

Server 2008 is a little more forgiving, but this is still a good place to start.

FDO Labels: Multi-line

You've long been able to label FDO features with multiple line labels using  '\n' in a concat string, as here: CONCAT ( ‘text’, ‘\n’, ‘this’ )

However, with the introduction of Enhanced Styles in 2012, that command changed for enhanced styles to '\P'.

I tried out this expression:  concat ( TOWN , '\P',  POPCH90_00 )

And got this result (the layer is also themed by POPCH90_00):

 

You can find more about this and other new features in 2012 here: http://docs.autodesk.com/MAP/2012/ENU/readme-map.html .

 

EDIT: You can use MAPSTYLE to change your default between Enhanced and Standard styles.

EDIT 2: MAPSTYLE doesn't really seem to make the difference.  Rather, it's whether you are labeling with Plain Text (use \n) or MTEXT (use \P).