Welcome to CivilGEO Knowledge Base
Welcome to CivilGEO Knowledge Base
CAD Properties
The CAD Properties dialog box allows the user to define various elements and their properties on the CAD drawing layer such as width, style, color of the polyline/polygon border, and fill color in the polygon. Furthermore, it also allows the user to view the list of externally referenced CAD drawings, change the CRS (coordinate reference system) of the current project, and automatically apply the transformation scale factor to any layer to accurately map it to the project CRS. To learn more about the coordinate reference system (CRS), refer to this article in our knowledge base.
Follow the steps below to open the CAD Properties dialog box:
- In the Map Data Layers panel, click on the […] button next to the CAD drawing layer.
- The CAD Properties dialog box will be displayed.
The CAD Properties dialog box contains four tabs as described below:
- General Options
- File References
- Spatial Reference
- Transformation
General Options
Various sections of the General Options tab are described below:
General Information
This section contains read-only information about the directory location and name of the CAD drawing file.
Assign Elevations
This section is used to assign elevation to elements on the CAD drawing layer. The following options are available:
- No elevation assigned: On selecting this option, no elevation will be assigned to the CAD drawing layer elements. Note that this radio button option is selected by default when the dialog box is displayed.
- Use CAD elements elevations: On selecting this option, the CAD drawing layer elements will use the same elevation defined for each entity and assign it to the CAD drawing layer elements.
The Add elevation offset entry allows the user to enter the offset value to raise or lower the elevation of the elements on the CAD drawing layer by a specified amount. Note that Add elevation offset entry is enabled only when the user selects the Use CAD elements elevations option.
Other Options
This section provide options to the user for displaying the CAD drawing file entities on the Map View.
- Display text: The user can check the Display text checkbox option to display the text entities.
- Display points: This checkbox option displays the node elements on the Map View.
- The user can also choose the desired shape, size, and border color of the node elements from the Symbol, Size and Border color options.
CAD Layer Properties
This section allows the user to filter various sub-layers of the CAD drawing layer listed in the grid table.
In the CAD layer filter dropdown combo box, the user can choose the desired layer option from the dropdown list to be displayed in the grid table.
In the grid table, the Layer Name column lists all the sub-layers of the parent CAD drawing layer, and their corresponding descriptions are displayed in the Description column. The user can toggle on and off the checkboxes next to the layer name to enable or disable the selected sub-layers.
The user has the option to display the entities of a particular sub-layer on the Map View by checking and unchecking the checkboxes in the Show column.
The user can also define the style of the elements associated with the sub-layers listed in the grid table from the Width, Style, Color, and Fill Color columns.
Clicking on the [Invert Selected] button will cause the software to flip the checkbox entries (i.e., checked entries will be unchecked and vice-versa) of the sub-layers in the Layer Name column.
Clicking on the [Select Pick] button allows the user to select the sub-layers from the Map View.
Clicking on the [Invert Hidden] button will cause the software to flip the checkbox entries of the sub-layers in the Show column.
Clicking on the [Hide Pick] button allows the user to select layers in order to hide entities of that layer from the Map View.
Checking the Show only selected checkbox option causes the software to hide unselected layers in the grid table. By default, this checkbox option is unchecked when the dialog box is displayed.
File References
In this tab, the user can view the hierarchy of externally referenced CAD drawing files in the data grid table. Note that the main CAD drawing file is always listed at the top of the data grid table. The Status column in the data grid displays the status of each referenced CAD drawing file: Loaded, Not Loaded, or Not Found.
The user has the option to display the desired CAD drawing layers on the Map View by checking the checkboxes in the Visible column.
Clicking the [Load] button will cause the software to reload the CAD drawing file of the selected row.
Clicking the [Unload] button will cause the software to unload the selected externally referenced CAD drawing file. Note that for the main CAD drawing file, this button is disabled (i.e., grayed out).
Clicking the [Remove] button will cause the software to remove the CAD drawing file for the selected row.
Clicking the [Reload All] button will cause the software to reload all of the externally referenced CAD drawing files along with the main CAD drawing file listed in the data grid table. Note that this button is used once the user updates the externally referenced CAD drawing files.
Clicking the [Update] button will cause the software to display the Update File Path dialog box. The user can update the path to an externally referenced CAD drawing and select the CAD drawing file for reattaching it as the externally referenced CAD drawing file. Alternatively, the user can select the Reattach command from the right-click context menu to update the path to an externally referenced CAD drawing and select the CAD drawing file.
The data in the data grid table can be copied to the clipboard or exported as a Microsoft Excel or PDF document by using the Copy Table to Clipboard, Export Table to Excel, or Export Table to PDF commands from the right-click context menu.
In addition, right-clicking on the data grid table displays the following commands in the displayed context menu:
- Unload: On selecting this command, the user can remove the CAD drawing file from the project, but it will still be displayed in the data grid table.
- Reload: On selecting this command, the user can reload the CAD drawing file if the currently referenced CAD drawing file is unloaded.
- Reattach: This command works similar to that of the [Update] button.
The Details window displays various information associated with the externally referenced CAD drawing file selected in the data grid table, such as the reference name, status, size, last modified date, original path of the CAD file, and the path at which the CAD file is saved.
Spatial Reference
The Spatial Reference tab allows the user to manually assign the project’s CRS to the non-CRS referenced data layer coordinates if the data layer lies within the project’s CRS. Refer to this article in our knowledge base to learn more about spatial reference.
Transformation
The Transformation tab allows the user to automatically apply the transformation scale factor to any particular layer and accurately map it to the project coordinate reference system (CRS). Refer to this article in our knowledge base to learn more about layer transformation.
