Using a Map Query with Civil 3D Drawings

I spend a lot of my time talking to Civil 3D users about the wonderful (and often overlooked features) of Map. After all, Civil 3D is built on top of Map, and Map offers a host of functionality not even related to GIS. One of those functions is the QUERY.

Queries allow us to bring all or parts of a Source Drawing. This is a drawing that we’ve attached to our current drawing using the Map workspace. Queries are wonderful because they can bring in data from a drawing based on object properties, object location, object data, or SQL information.

In the past, I’ve used Map Query to bring a drawing in one coodinate system over to another coordinate system. This is done by setting the coordinate system in the source drawing, setting the desired coordinate system in a blank drawing, and querying in all data into the blank drawing. The coordinate conversion is relatively automatic.

HOWEVER…..

Map queries won’t work with Civil 3D objects. I had a drawing with ONLY Civil 3D objects in it, and Map queried in nothing. So, for all of you who had the incredible idea of querying your data to do a coordinate zone conversion, you’ve got to come up with a better way. I’m working on trying to figure that out now.

3 comments

  1. Jason Hickey says:

    Apparently, I was the last to know this. And I thought we were all about SHARING information 😉

  2. The Dinosaur says:

    You had me VERY exciited when I saw the title. The truth is though, MAP queries can still be very useful when using Civil 3D, especially when analyzing a problem drawing or one from an outside source that you may not trust. Selected drawing elements can be imported directly into a fresh drawing without opening the suspect drawing. Although it may be a bit more work to obtain data this way rather than a wblock or copy/paste operation there is a minimum of unwanted baggage from the source drawing. I know one Civil 3D master who NEVER opens a drawing from any source.

  3. Jason Hickey says:

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the functionality of MAP queries. However, they’re almost useless with Civil 3D since they won’t bring in any Civil 3D Objects. And since we’re working toward a drawing with nothing BUT C3D objects, that makes it not cool anymore.

    Still works great for other things, though.