Saturday, August 2, 2008

Working with Oracle UDT’s with AutoCAD Map 3D

Author: Jonio, Dennis

Within this series of articles I have pretty well illustrated Oracle’s ODP.NET working in "harmony" with Autodesk’s Map3d 2008. Also note that I have used Oracle XE throughout. The functionality Locator brings is certainly more than enough to build a reasonable GIS data store. I have not spent any time in outlining any of the other Oracle stored procedures like SDO_GEOM.VALIDATE_GEOMETRY_WITH_CONTEXT() these are all well documented across the internet. As I have said before, FDO is the way to go. But you still need to get that geometry built somewhere and put into a data store. "Map Export to FDO" is obviously a work in progress but hopefully will become a useful tool down the road.

Lessons Learned
  • Always turn Connection Pooling OFF when working with UDT’s.

  • Do NOT use the App.config method for UDT discovery that is described in the ODP.NET documentation. This does no work in all cases. It seems nested classes are not always resolved.

  • Since your UDT class assembly(s) will be referenced from, in the default case: "C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Map 3D 2008", be careful of your naming convention.
Source code (C#):