Adding an FDO provider

This isn’t something that we see too often, but it is possible to add any of the FDO providers that are available here:  http://fdo.osgeo.org/  to Map 3D.  Here are the steps (and bear in mind that these aren’t supported by Autodesk – they are kindly made by the open source community and made available to the world).

1.    Decide what provider you need. I’ll use OGR as it’s the most popular one for Map 3D.
2.    Download it.  Be sure that you get the right version (both 32/64 bit and FDO version).   Check your needed version by :

• Opening providers.xml and checking the versions of the FDO providers that are in there already
• You can find providers.xml somewhere like C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Map 3D 2010\FDO\bin
• For this example (Map 3D 2010 on x86) I used http://download.osgeo.org/fdo/3.4.0/release/binaries/fdoogr-win32-3.4.0.tar.gz .  Be sure to check on the download page for updates. 

3.    Extract the .dll from the download to your \FDO\bin folder.  To do so:

•     Unzip the downloaded file.  You may need a downloaded utility that can handle both .tar and .gz compression.  I personally like 7Zip.
• Once you have the .dll extracted from the file, you will likely have a bin folder that was created in the location that you did the extraction.  Go into the folder and copy the .dll.
• Go to C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Map 3D 2010\FDO\bin and paste the .dll there (you'll need Map/Civil to be closed at this point).

4.    Open providers.xml and edit it such that the OGR provider is included at the end of the list.  You can just copy an existing section and edit as follows:  
  (be sure to keep the </FeatureProviderRegistry> at the end of the file).  You may need to open your text editor as administrator to save to the right file location.
5.    Save the edited version, and open Map.
6.    Go to Data Connect.  You should have OGR in your list of providers: 

7.    Put in the full path to your file, such as C:\temp\massGIS\TOWNS_POLYM.shp, and you’ll be on your way.

Wondering why all the effort to connect to a shapefile when we have a provider just for that?  Well, OGR supports a slew of other vector formats, and the GDAL provider a good number more of raster formats, never mind the other options, such as SQLite, King Oracle, etc.

Thanks for originally getting me started with OGR go to Murph and this post

Edited Sept 7