Many organizations already have graphical indexes, such as administrative boundaries, project locations, or zones of interest. The Spatial Location File Creation tool, available in integrated MicroStation, lets these organizations reuse existing indexes and import them into a ProjectWise datasource.

The Spatial Location File Creation tool is an MDL application launched within MicroStation to extract object geometries from a DGN and store these geometries in a spatial location file (SLF), which is simply an XML document. Once the SLF is created in MicroStation, the geometries it contains can be loaded in ProjectWise using the Load SLF tool, which will automatically assign spatial locations to corresponding ProjectWise documents or folders.

There is no preferred or fixed index format supported. The tool can import any format: grid, text, scan from a local disk, and so on. The portion of the Spatial Location File Creation tool that reads and extracts the intelligence from an index is written in MicroStation Visual Basic, so that it can be easily modified and adapted to any case.

Two examples are provided. The first example, which is the default, is called “slfShapeTextExample”. To use this example, you must utilize an index file (DGN file) containing shape and text elements. In fact, there must be one text element per shape. The second example is called “slfTextExample”. To use this example, you must utilize an index file (DGN file) containing text elements. A geometry corresponding to a (100 X 100) block will automatically be used for each text element when generating the SLF.

To specify which macro will be used, the PWGEO_SLFCAPTURE_VBAPRJNAME environment variable must be set accordingly in MicroStation. For example:

PWGEO_SLFCAPTURE_VBAPRJNAME = slfShapeTextExample

or

PWGEO_SLFCAPTURE_VBAPRJNAME = slfTextExample