Civil 3D: July 2008 Archives

Have you ever needed to add contours from PASDA and wondered why you can't?  It is because they are in an ESRI Personal Geodatabase.  Well I have a solution for you and here it is:

Close Civil 3D before you start this process. The first thing you need to know is that a personal geodatabase requires a specific type of FDO .dll which is not included in your Civil 3D program.  Not a bad thing because you can download it for free from www.osgeo.org. The file name is OGRprovider.dll By the way, if you do not know how to use the FDO technology then I suggest taking one of my Map 3D classes. This file needs to be copied into the directory: C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008\FDO\bin. There is one other file you need to modify and that is provider.xml  These files are found in the following directory: C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008\FDO\bin - I suggest that you make a backup copy of the providers.xml file.  You must add some code to the original file called provider.xml

   <FeatureProvider>
    <Name>OSGeo.OGR.3.2</Name>
    <DisplayName>OSGeo FDO Provider for OGR </DisplayName>
    <Description>Read access to OGR data stores (e.g. ESRI Personal GB). </Description>
    <IsManaged>False</IsManaged>
    <Version>3.2.1.0</Version>
    <FeatureDataObjectsVersion>3.2.1.0</FeatureDataObjectsVersion>
    <LibraryPath>OGRProvider.dll</LibraryPath>
  </FeatureProvider>

This code will allow the FDO connection to recognize the new connection type.

Open Civil 3D

Change your workspace to Map 3D for Geospatial.

Go to the View menu and click on Task Pane. This will open your data connection tool.

Click on data - Connect to Data - Add OGR Connection. In the data source filed type in the directory and filename.mdb into this line.  You can also copy and paste the path in here.

Click connect and your data should appear in a dialog box.

Choose the datasets you want to add to your project.