AutoCAD Civil installation causes problem with existing Map installation

If you install AutoCAD Map 2017 and afterwards Civil 2017 exporting a Map drawing (FDO layers) as CAD drawing (command: _MAPTOACAD) might fail.

In particular if a template is used when exporting. Map will perform the export but will not finish the process - the dialog box won't disappear and the process cannot be cancelled. Map still uses CPU resources and needs to be closed forcefully. The drawing will be created and can be opened - but I'm not sure if all elements have been exported or not.
I had to reinstall Map to solve the issue.

Map 2017, SP1

Map-Plot and plotting in background

Again it took me some time to figure out that Map-Plot and AutoCAD background plotting don't go well together. With Map 2013 we did use Map Plot for plotting maps as PDFs and we did not have an issue with regards to background-plotting although I do not know whether we just had not enabled background-plotting or the behavoir has changed in Map 2017.

Here are a few observations of Map 2017 and Map-Plots:

- Map Plot batch plotting does not work, Map will crash after the second plot and no PDF will be created
- if a single Map-plot is plotted manually (via context menu) an AutoCAD layout is being created and the map correctly rendered but it wont plot to the device (at least as long as a PDF plotter is being used), one needs to plot the AutoCAD layout manually
- when the AutoCAD layout has been created and the layout is plotted the resulting PDF file is sometimes empty, if the layout is plotted a second time the PDF file will be fine (if background-plotting is enabled)
- when the layout has been created and the layout is plotted error messages might appear:
FDO-Verbindung konnte nicht geöffnet werden. (cannot open FDO connection)
ORA-01005:  kein Kennwort angegeben; Anmeldung verweigert. (null password given; logon denied)
...
WARNUNG: Beim Anwenden von Stilen auf das Element PLT_V_GRID_EXTLINE_TBL sind folgende Probleme aufgetreten:
Objektquelle ist nicht verbunden. (whilst applying styles to element PLT_V_GRID_EXTLINE_TBL the following issue occured: feature source not connected)
...
and the PDF is created correctly (if background-plotting is enabled)

If you use Map-plots and you run into issues check whether background plotting is enabled or not. If you need batch plotting and you get crashes as well - have a look here.

I also noticed that disabling background-plotting seems to be ignored until Map is restarted,.

Map 2017, SP1

MapGuide Logfile - two warnings and what they mean

MapGuide log file contains the following warnings:

<2017-02-14T08:54:36> 4712 Ajax Viewer 10.99.66.2 Administrator
 Warning: An exception occurred in FDO component.
        Beim Abrufen eines Eigenschaftenwerts stimmte der Eigenschaftentyp nicht überein. 
 StackTrace:
  - MgStylizationUtil.ExceptionTrap() line 813 file StylizationEngine.cpp
  
the error message translates roughly as 
  "property value and property typ do not match"
  
The message was caused by the following filter definition:  

W_ID_TYPE  = 1 AND  (   W_ID_TYPE_IP  NULL    OR   NOT  W_ID_TYPE_IP  IN ( '1') )

W_ID_TYPE_IP is numeric but the value is given as string.  
  
 The second one:
  
<2017-02-14T12:19:44> 3444 10.99.66.65 Anonymous
 Warning: An exception occurred in FDO component.
        Die Kennung 'w_id_type' wurde nicht erkannt. 
 StackTrace:
  - MgStylizationUtil.ExceptionTrap() line 813 file StylizationEngine.cpp  
  
the error message translates roughly as 
  "property 'w_id_type' not found."

The message was caused by the following filter definition:  

w_id_type  IN ( 11)   AND NOT  ID_SITE_TYPE  IN (2007)

Property names as case-sensitive. The feature class does not contain 'w_id_type' but 'W_ID_TYPE'.


Unfortunately for both warnings no further information is given to where exactly the issues occur. I stumbled across the cause of the first warning by looking for the cause of the second warning. The second warning tells you exactly what the problem is - unfortunately I only realized that after I had spent several hours looking for it. 'w_id_type' is an attribute we use in many feature classes and 71 layers reference the attribute in filter expressions. It was somehow obvious that there is a problem in one of the layers but not in all of them as the warning did not appear all the time. Took me quite some time to figure out what was going on - despite the warning being clear about it.

AIMS 2017





  
  

MapGuide - renderMap - transparency

The RenderMap functions takes a MgColor object in order to set the background color of the map.
I wanted to have a transparent background - according to the API docs you can create a MgColor object by providing values for RGB and alpha:

MgColor(int red, int green, int blue, int alpha);

Problem is, the map background wont show up transparent. In order to have the background transparent MgColor needs to be called by passing hexvalues instead:

MgColor("ffffff00");

AIMS 2017