ArcSDE CAD Client #1
The FREE GIS CAD Interoperability Solution
The most exciting basketball games of the season are behind us; of course I speak my daughter’s freshman basketball team. Their tiny school faced some more experienced, taller, faster and older girls in the tournament, but came back from a 10 point deficit late in the fourth quarter of the final game in the consolation round (after losing in the semi-finals to the eventual champions) to tie the game. Giving their all in a full court trap they managed to steal the ball over-and-over successfully converting free throws and a couple three pointers. Down by two points with seven seconds, one of our veteran players, an 8th grader, was fouled after the opponents missed free throw, and she went to the free throw line. The league is for 9th graders, but our school only had one 9th grade player; the rest of the team was made up of two 8th graders, two 7th graders and six 6th graders. Our seasoned 8th grader stepped up to the line and confidently buried both her free throws to tie the game and the clock ran out before the opponents could get off a shot. Now running (flying) on adrenaline after the comeback, the full court press produces several more steals, layins and free throws and our team won going away in overtime!
Inspired by that come back I’d like to spend a little bit of time with an often overlooked GIS and CAD Interoperability solution. ArcSDE CAD Client is often de-emphasized as an ESRI Interoperability solution because it does not have the ability to edit an ArcGIS geodatabase. However, in workflows where you are simply building GIS databases, or need access to the current ArcSDE basemap from within CAD, the ArcSDE CAD Client for AutoCAD or Microstation is a useful, viable, and very clever FREE application!
This is the first in a series of posting on the topic of the ArcSDE CAD Client software. If you have ArcSDE then you have on that CD a copy of CAD Client. This is a no-cost add-on to Microstation or AutoCAD that allows you to query data out of ArcSDE and “RETIEVE” features into your current CAD session. ArcSDE CAD Client also lets you store and edit ArcSDE simple features. I’ll talk more about the distinction between ArcSDE simple feature and ArcGIS Geodatabase features a little more in a future post. Suffice to say for now CAD Client is read/only for ArcSDE geodatabases and read/write for ArcSDE simple features.
For those of you still dealing with a large amount of legacy ArcInfo Coverage data there is a often overlooked ArcSDE extension for Coverages called ArcSDE for Coverages that serves up Coverage data as if it was an ArcSDE database. This means an ArcSDE Client software like the ArcSDE CAD Client would also be able to access the data stored in a coverage using the ArcSDE for Coverages interface.
The most exciting basketball games of the season are behind us; of course I speak my daughter’s freshman basketball team. Their tiny school faced some more experienced, taller, faster and older girls in the tournament, but came back from a 10 point deficit late in the fourth quarter of the final game in the consolation round (after losing in the semi-finals to the eventual champions) to tie the game. Giving their all in a full court trap they managed to steal the ball over-and-over successfully converting free throws and a couple three pointers. Down by two points with seven seconds, one of our veteran players, an 8th grader, was fouled after the opponents missed free throw, and she went to the free throw line. The league is for 9th graders, but our school only had one 9th grade player; the rest of the team was made up of two 8th graders, two 7th graders and six 6th graders. Our seasoned 8th grader stepped up to the line and confidently buried both her free throws to tie the game and the clock ran out before the opponents could get off a shot. Now running (flying) on adrenaline after the comeback, the full court press produces several more steals, layins and free throws and our team won going away in overtime!Inspired by that come back I’d like to spend a little bit of time with an often overlooked GIS and CAD Interoperability solution. ArcSDE CAD Client is often de-emphasized as an ESRI Interoperability solution because it does not have the ability to edit an ArcGIS geodatabase. However, in workflows where you are simply building GIS databases, or need access to the current ArcSDE basemap from within CAD, the ArcSDE CAD Client for AutoCAD or Microstation is a useful, viable, and very clever FREE application!
This is the first in a series of posting on the topic of the ArcSDE CAD Client software. If you have ArcSDE then you have on that CD a copy of CAD Client. This is a no-cost add-on to Microstation or AutoCAD that allows you to query data out of ArcSDE and “RETIEVE” features into your current CAD session. ArcSDE CAD Client also lets you store and edit ArcSDE simple features. I’ll talk more about the distinction between ArcSDE simple feature and ArcGIS Geodatabase features a little more in a future post. Suffice to say for now CAD Client is read/only for ArcSDE geodatabases and read/write for ArcSDE simple features.
For those of you still dealing with a large amount of legacy ArcInfo Coverage data there is a often overlooked ArcSDE extension for Coverages called ArcSDE for Coverages that serves up Coverage data as if it was an ArcSDE database. This means an ArcSDE Client software like the ArcSDE CAD Client would also be able to access the data stored in a coverage using the ArcSDE for Coverages interface.
posted by Don Kuehne at 1:20 PM
4 Comments:
I'm looking forward to reading more about the SDE CAD client.
One question: Does the CAD client enable access to rasters stored in SDE, or is it vector only?
CAD Client does not support raster data storage or retrieval, however it does have the ability to store and retrieve the CAD binary representations of entities.
That's cool; I didn't even know that the CAD client existed. Does it require any kind of licensing, either an ArcGIS license on the client or some kind of connect license on the ArcSDE server?
I have been looking at the FDO provider for ArcSDE, which comes with MapGuide Open Source and Autodesk Map 3D. It appears to require the presence of some ESRI dlls to function, and leaves the task of ensuring license compliance in the user's hands.
Do you have any comments about how this interoperability solution compares with the ESRI CAD Client?
My personal feeling is that any tool that encourages users to work with ArcSDE would be of benefit to ESRI...
Good Points, I'll be sure to cover this information in the series. I'll discuss a couple different "client software" products to ESRI's ArcSDE, in this BLOG series that are developed by both Bentley and Autodesk.
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