Importing external geographic data (GIS library, ArcGIS, OpenStreetMap, GPS)

What it does

The four commands on this page solve the same problem by different routes: putting geometry that was born in geographic coordinates into the drawing. All of them need to know the output coordinate system — see Coordinates and the coordinate system, and in particular What actually converts, because the system list here offers far more than the converter resolves. For the opposite direction (the drawing leaving as KML, GPX or GeoJSON) see KMZ, geo formats and map links.

CAPCAD_GEO_ARCGIS_SERVER opens the ArcGIS Server Assistant, the general-purpose importer: you supply the URL. The assistant recognises whether it is a folder, a service (MapServer / FeatureServer) or a layer, and fills the corresponding lists. This is the tool to reach any public dataset your own country publishes.

CAPCAD_GIS_BR_LIBRARY opens the GIS Library, which is the same importer with a catalogue in front of it. On opening, the command fetches the list of categories and presets from the CapCad server. Each preset is an already-tested ArcGIS layer address, with a suggested default field and default layer. The presets shipped today are Brazilian; outside the Brazil profile the command has no ribbon button, and the ArcGIS Server Assistant is the route to use instead.

Both end in the same import run, described in How the options combine.

CAPCAD_GEO_OSM_IMPORT opens the Open Street Maps Extractor: you define the area (screen, two-point rectangle or a corridor around an alignment), tick the feature families you want, and the command queries the Overpass API, converts everything into the drawing's system and draws each feature on the layer of its OSM tag, with the road width you set.

CAPCAD_GEO_CONVERT_DATA opens the Geo Data Converter: you point at a .kml or .gpx file, the command reads the points and the lines, suggests the zone and draws them — in plan or, in profile mode, projecting each point perpendicularly onto the project's alignment to form a station × elevation profile.

Workflow

Bringing in a layer from any ArcGIS server

1. Run CAPCAD_GEO_ARCGIS_SERVER.
2. Paste the URL into Url (43) and click Read (44) — or choose one of the presets (42). The label beside the button says what was recognised: folder, service or layer.
3. Walk down the tree: clicking in Services (48) fills Layers (49), clicking a layer fills Fields (50) and the feature count.
4. Select a field and click View values (52). Tick values (the All (53) and Clear (54) shortcuts help) and Add condition (55) writes field='value' OR … into Where: (56).
5. Choose the coordinate system (57) and the area (60, 61 or 62), and click Generate CAD data (63).

Bringing in a ready base from the GIS Library

1. Run CAPCAD_GIS_BR_LIBRARY. The form opens and fetches the library from the server; with no network, it warns and opens empty.
2. Choose the Category (1) and the Preset (2). The Fields list (3) and the feature count are filled at once, by querying the server.
3. Choose the field that will name the layers. With Auto values (8) on, the Values list (4) comes filled and sorted; otherwise, click View values (5).
4. Select the values you want — box (6) filters the list — and click Add condition (9). The clause appears in Where: (12).
5. Check the Output coordinate system (17) and choose the Insertion area (21, 22 or 23).
6. Add to CAD (26).

Extracting OpenStreetMap

1. Run CAPCAD_GEO_OSM_IMPORT. The form opens with the project's coordinate system already at (64).
2. In the Include column (69 to 83), tick the feature families. The All (86) and None (87) shortcuts tick and untick everything.
3. Choose the area: Entire screen (70), 2 point rectangle (71) or Align. (72). The big button (66) changes its caption to match.
4. On the other tabs, adjust what comes out (95, 96) and the road widths (104 to 115).
5. Click the big button (66). In alignment mode, the command asks for the alignment and then for the corridor radius (the value at 98 is the prompt's default).
6. A progress bar follows the query and the processing; Cancel works. When it finishes, the command line reports how many roads and how many features were drawn.
7. Not happy with the result? Reset (67) erases everything the last run drew.

Converting a KML or GPX file

1. Run CAPCAD_GEO_CONVERT_DATA.
2. Choose the file at … (117) or paste the path into (116) — surrounding quotes are stripped for you, and the box stays red while the path does not exist. Enter, or Read (118), processes it.
3. The form reports what it detected (kml or gpx), how many points and how many lines it loaded and, when the coordinates point at a single possible zone, turns the coordinate-system box green and fills it in.
4. Choose Draw in plan (123) or Profile onto the alignment (125), tick the layer suffixes (122, 124) if you want, and click Draw (127).

The forms

The numbers are unique on this page: 1 to 41 in the GIS Library, 42 to 63 in the ArcGIS Server Assistant, 64 to 115 in the OSM Extractor and 116 to 128 in the Geo Data Converter. All the captures are of a Portuguese session; the numbering is the same in both editions, and the tables give the English captions.

GIS Library — CAPCAD_GIS_BR_LIBRARY

The form opens narrow; the Options ↔ button (18) reveals the right-hand half.

The options panel

With Options ↔ clicked. Most of the controls in this panel are not available in this version.

ArcGIS Server Assistant — CAPCAD_GEO_ARCGIS_SERVER

The three unlabelled boxes (45, 46, 47) hold the folder, service and layer URLs resolved by browsing.

Open Street Maps Extractor — CAPCAD_GEO_OSM_IMPORT

Tab 1: Main

With the factory defaults: two-point rectangle, every family ticked, road names in the layer.

Tab 2: General options

The area-limit boxes are informational: the limits the command applies are those in the table under How the options combine.

Tab 3: Roads styling

The widths become the drawn polyline's ConstantWidth. The factory values are the ones in the table below.

The factory widths: RESIDENTIAL 4, SECONDARY 10, SERVICE 2, TERTIARY 6, PROPOSED 0.5, CYCLEWAY 1, TRUNK_LINK 6, TRUNK 6, MOTORWAY 20, LIVING_STREET 3, PEDESTRIAN 2, UNCLASSIFIED 0.5.

Geo Data Converter — CAPCAD_GEO_CONVERT_DATA

With no file loaded: Draw (127) is disabled.

How the options combine

The ArcGIS import

The GIS Library and the ArcGIS Server Assistant share the same run:

1. With no output coordinate system, nothing happens — the command asks you to choose one. Choosing WGS-84, it confirms first (the drawing will be in degrees).
2. Envelope. In Screen and Rectangle modes, the two corners are converted to latitude/longitude and become the query's envelope. If that conversion fails, the command reports "Envelope conversion failed" and stops.
3. Size guards. Whole space with more than 1,000 features asks for confirmation. A server answer above 100 MB is refused; above 10 MB, the command estimates the time and asks whether to carry on.
4. The query always goes with outSR=4326: the data arrive in WGS-84 and the conversion into the drawing's system is done here, vertex by vertex.
5. Layers. With a field chosen, each feature goes to GIS_<field>-<value>. With no field chosen, the GIS Library uses the preset's description (GIS_<description>) and the ArcGIS Server Assistant, which has no description to offer, puts everything on a layer called simply GIS_. Invalid layer-name characters are stripped.
6. Point layers (esriGeometryPoint) become POINTs — and, in this version, on the current layer, with no colour and no transparency.
7. Colour and transparency. Random colours draw ACI 1 to 250 per feature. Transparency only comes through the GIS Library, always.
8. UTM zones, when asked for and in the Brazilian product: the meridians go to GIS_UTMZONES_<system> (colour 64) and the zone numbers to GIS_FUSOS_TXT (colour 51), both grey, with a text height of 2 in WGS-84 output and 200,000 in projected output.
9. At the end, a box reports how many items were drawn, in which system, and in how many seconds.

What OSM draws, and where

The feature's tag decides the layer, the width and whether it can be hatched. The order is the one below, and the first match wins:

landuse and leisure features fall into the any other row, with the layer built from the feature's first tag.

The OSM area limits

The command measures the area before querying the server and refuses or asks according to the table. What changes everything is the building box (73): buildings multiply the volume of data.

In corridor mode the area is estimated as alignment length × 2 × radius, and the same limits apply.

"Roads: unite"

With 77 ticked, after drawing, each road becomes the outline of its width:

• A road that is genuinely closed produces two rings: the larger enters the union, the smaller is left drawn on the road's layer, and the original polyline is erased.
• An open road with a width produces one outline, which enters the union, and the original is erased.
• A road with zero width is left as it is.

The gathered outlines go through a region union on layer GIS_OSM_HIGHWAY, with a "Merging roads…" bar, and the result receives a group id — which is what Reset (67) uses to erase the union. Roads that could not be outlined are counted on the command line and left as drawn.

What the file converter draws

Points are drawn at whatever elevation the file carries, and the PDMODE variable is set to 3 so that they appear as crosses. The view is only framed when at least one line was drawn — a points-only file does not move the screen.

Remembered between sessions

The GIS Library and the ArcGIS Server Assistant keep their options on closing (area, zoom, colours, polygon text, UTM zones, token, coordinate system). The OSM Extractor keeps practically everything — the ticked families, the general options and the twelve road widths; what is left out is the screen-reading boxes and the last link's coordinates. The Geo Data Converter keeps nothing: the file path, the zone and the boxes come back empty on every opening.

The coordinate system chosen in the GIS Library and in the Converter also becomes the session's "last used", which the other GIS commands pick up.

Notes

• Not every system in the list actually converts. The coordinate-system box of these forms offers WGS-84, BNG and the 120 zones UTM-01S to UTM-60N. Conversion, however, only covers SIRGAS 2000 and SAD 69 over zones 17 to 25 South and 11 to 22 North — South American coverage. WGS-84 works because output in degrees goes through no conversion at all; BNG and any zone outside those bands do not convert, and the result is either an "Envelope conversion failed" or an import that discards every feature. In practice, use UTM-17S to UTM-25S and UTM-11N to UTM-22N. See What actually converts.
• The GIS Library always applies 50 % transparency. Even if you never open the options panel, everything this form imports enters the drawing at 50 % transparency. For full opacity you have to open Options ↔ and zero box 32. The ArcGIS Server Assistant applies no transparency at all.
• The GIS Library's hydrology presets do not import here. Those three entries refer you to CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DATA. Selecting them disables Whole space and Screen and switches the mode to Rectangle; Add to CAD only shows the message.
• Points imported from ArcGIS land on the current layer. Point-geometry layers are drawn as POINTs with no layer, colour or transparency assigned. Set the current layer before importing a point layer.
• AND in the GIS Library's condition builder returns nothing. Unticking OR (7) builds field='a' AND field='b', which no record satisfies. The button is only useful when you edit the clause by hand afterwards.
• The two condition builders behave differently. In the GIS Library, Add condition (9) rewrites the box; in the ArcGIS Server Assistant, Add condition (55) accumulates. Clicking twice in the assistant duplicates the condition.
• Three OSM boxes are not available in this version: administrative (83), points (94) and Take width property from OSM whenever possible (103); nor is Redraw (68). The Roads styling tab has no PRIMARY row — primary roads get the default width 0.5.
• The OSM area-limit boxes (99 and 100) are informational. The limits applied are those in the table above (5 and 1 km² to ask, 500 and 300 km² to refuse); editing the boxes changes nothing.
• The cycleway and footway layers are created with colour 0 (ByBlock) — GIS_OSM_BICYCLE and GIS_OSM_FOOT; adjust it in the layer manager if you need to.
• CAPCAD_GEO_OSM_IMPORT requires the Highway licence module. The other three commands on this page are not licence-gated.
• There is less command on the other four CADs. On BricsCAD, GstarCAD, ZWCAD and ARES Commander: the OSM Extractor opens modal and the big button only closes the form — the launchers (65, 84, 88, 89), Reset (67), the screen readings (91, 101) and the options for hatching, road union, names in the layer, widths and lines/polygons are not applied; the drawing uses a simplified layer name per tag. In the Geo Data Converter, the Sample (120) and Add curve from CAD (128) buttons are not available, and Profile mode answers that it only exists on AutoCAD. The GIS Library and the ArcGIS Server Assistant work on all five.
• The OpenStreetMap API is public and queues. The query goes to the public Overpass API with a 180 s timeout; if it fails, the command retries once silently before giving up. Only features of type way are fetched — isolated nodes and relations are left out.
• The profile mode's elevation comes from the GPX file, not from the terrain: CapCad uses each point's <ele> tag and exaggerates the vertical scale by 10×.
• Several OSM Extractor strings are English-only in every language, including the big button's caption and all the progress messages (Sending query…, Processing Open Street Maps data n/3…, Merging roads…). The GIS Library's options panel is English-only as well.