Brazil geographic data library

This page describes a single-country tool. Both commands talk to Brazilian national services and nothing else: the datasets, the administrative divisions, the road codes and the UTM zone list are all Brazil's. There is no equivalent for another country here, and the commands cannot be pointed at another country's servers. If you work outside Brazil and want the same kind of result — official boundaries, a road network, place names, drawn straight into the CAD in your own coordinate system — use the ArcGIS Server assistant for any public ArcGIS REST endpoint, or the OpenStreetMap extractor, both on Importing external geographic data. This page is here because the commands exist in every build and you may meet them on the ribbon.

What it does

Both commands do the same thing in three steps: query a public service, convert the result from WGS-84 into the chosen coordinate system, and draw it in model space on its own layers. What changes is the source and the clip.

CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DATA covers the national mapping agency's holdings, in eight tabs:

• Municípios (municipalities) and States — polygons of the administrative divisions, by name or by geographic clip.
• Brazil boundaries — the outline of the country, optionally with the 6° meridians that separate the UTM zones and a label per zone.
• Streets — the street centrelines of one municipality.
• Projeto Rios do Brasil (a rivers project) — hydrography from a local dataset (rivers and water bodies, basins, hydrographic regions), filtered by a rectangle you draw.
• Downloads — a ready-made dwg of the boundaries for one zone, downloaded from the CapCad server and opened.
• Hydrography — the agency's geographic-names query by bounding box, with a button to undo what was drawn.
• Busca Topônimos (place-name search) — searches a name in the national geographic-names database and draws whatever it finds.

CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DNIT_SNV covers the federal highway authority. Its main tab carries the national road-network table in a BR → state → code cascade, draws the corresponding federal-highway layer, and writes a simplified version of the table as an alignment property. The other three tabs belong to a federal road-marking programme: migrating horizontal-marking material, the specification lists for vertical signage, and quality control.

The zone is the pivot for everything. The bottom bar of CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DATA and the Zone box of the SNV assistant feed the conversion. <Detect> lets the program infer the zone from the longitude of the data returned — but several options (boundaries, streets, hydrography, downloads, clips by screen or by click) require an explicit zone and warn if you leave it on <Detect>.

Language. GeoBrasilForm has almost no English captions: in an English session most of its buttons, tabs and check boxes read in Portuguese, and so do many of the SNV assistant's. The tables below quote the caption as the software shows it, with a gloss in brackets where it is Portuguese. Most status-line messages are English in every language.

Workflow

Bringing in a municipality or a state

1. Run CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DATA. If the drawing has a coordinate system set, it already appears in the Zone box (10) and the Detectado: label confirms it.
2. On the Municípios tab, choose the name in box 1 (the list holds 5,249 municipalities; typing autocompletes) and click Desenhar Munícipio por nome (2) [draw municipality by name]. Or go to States, choose the state (17) and click Desenhar UF por nome (18) [draw state by name].
3. The status line shows Fetching…, then how many features came back, how many polylines were drawn, and in which zone.
4. With Zoom to (3 or 22) ticked, the view goes to what was drawn.

Bringing in the streets of a stretch

1. Choose an explicit zone at 10.
2. Streets tab › Selecionar area (25) [select area]. Click two corners in the drawing. The program identifies the municipality at the first corner, downloads that municipality's dataset (once per session) and draws only what falls inside the rectangle.
3. Todos do município (26) [all of the municipality] does the same with no clip, from a single point clicked inside the municipality — with a warning first, because it is slow.

Bringing in the road network and writing it onto the alignment

1. Run CAPCAD_GEO_BR_DNIT_SNV. The table is downloaded on opening; if the server does not answer, the command warns and the form opens empty.
2. Choose the BR (48) and the state (49). The section-code list (50) and the table (52) filter themselves, and the counter under the table says how many sections are left (Total SNVs: n).
3. Check the Zone (51) and click one of the five draw buttons (62 to 66) for the clip you want.
4. To take the table to the alignment, click Set eixo SNV (59): the simplified list in box 58 (start kilometre in metres + section code) is written to the SNV property of the alignment. If one is already there, the command asks before overwriting.

The geographic-data form

The form has eight tabs and one common bottom bar. The numbers are unique on this page: 1 to 47 in GeoBrasilForm, 48 to 75 in SnvForm. Numbers 10 to 16 are the bottom bar, and appear on all eight tabs.

Tab 1: Municípios (municipalities)

The Municípios tab with the common bottom bar. The first red button is disabled in this version. All captures on this page are of a Portuguese session; the numbering is the same in both editions — and most of these captions are Portuguese in an English session too.

Bottom bar (all tabs)

Tab 2: States

The States tab: the same four ways of clipping, now over the states.

Tab 3: Brazil boundaries

The Brazil boundaries tab.

Tab 4: Streets

The Streets tab. The last two buttons are pending.

Tab 5: Projeto Rios do Brasil (rivers)

The Projeto Rios do Brasil tab.

Tab 6: Downloads

The Downloads tab.

Tab 7: Hydrography

The Hydrography tab.

Tab 8: Busca Topônimos (place-name search)

The Busca Topônimos tab, with the result list empty.

The SNV assistant

Tab 1: SNVs

The SNVs tab, before choosing a BR. The table and the simplified list are empty.

All five draw buttons go through the same importer: it queries the federal-highway service, warns if the result exceeds 1,000 features with no clip, converts into the zone, creates one layer per value of the vl_codigo field, assigns random colours and applies 50 % transparency. When it finishes, a box reports how many items were drawn, in which system, and in how many seconds.

Tab 2: Horizontal marking material

The BR-Legal 2: Horizontal tab. This tab belongs to a Brazilian federal road-marking programme and its layer naming convention.

Tab 3: Vertical signage specification

The BR-Legal 2: Vertical tab. The five lists are not available in this version.

Tab 4: Quality control

The quality-control tab: one button, not available in this version.

What gets drawn

Characters forbidden in a layer name (< > / \ " : ; ? * | = ' ,) are replaced with _.

Remembered between sessions

Neither form keeps its options between sessions: the tick boxes return to their defaults on every opening. What persists is the drawing's zone (written by CAPCAD_GEO_CRS, see Coordinates and the coordinate system), the SNV property written onto the alignment, and the downloaded files — hydrography and street datasets stay in the project's exports folder and are not downloaded again; within the same session they are not re-parsed either.

Notes

• The two hydrography radio buttons load each other's dataset. Choosing Basins loads the hydrographic regions dataset, and choosing Regiões hidrográficas loads the basins; the layer names (GIS_RIOSBR_REGIOES_* and GIS_RIOSBR_BACIAS_*) follow the dataset, not the radio button's label.
• The <Detect> zone option is not good for everything. Country boundaries, streets, hydrography, geographic names, downloads and every clip by screen, entity, two points or click require a zone chosen by hand. In those cases the status line asks for an explicit zone.
• Most of this form is Portuguese in an English session, and most of its status messages are English in every language (Fetching…, Downloading…, Nothing found in the area., Draw failed:, Area too big…). The same is true of the SNV assistant's Simplified (m + código) for the eixo SNV property: label and its Set eixo SNV button.
• Four buttons are not available in this version and say so on the status line: Fusos Brasil… (13), Escrever nomes de ruas… (29), Fillet condicional… (30) and, in the SNV assistant, Verificar padrões DNIT (75). Unir polylines onde possível (28) is not available either, and Desenhar todos municípios Brasil (4) is disabled.
• Street centrelines come in as separate segments; joining and labelling are not available in this version.
• The zone labels on the country boundary are placed at latitude −50, in the middle of each 6° band, at a fixed height of 200,000 units, which suits projected coordinates.
• Everything depends on the network. The form is frozen while it waits for an answer. A server error becomes a status-line message (or a box, in the SNV assistant, which opens empty if the table does not arrive).
• The rectangle's area is checked before the query. Under 100 m² is refused as too small; above the dataset's limit, as too large. The rectangle is converted corner by corner to latitude-longitude, so it may skew slightly against the rectangle you drew.
• The GIS Library (CAPCAD_GIS_BR_LIBRARY) sends hydrology here. Choosing a hydrology preset there answers by pointing you at the Projeto Rios do Brasil tab of this form.
• The conversion has the same coverage limits as everywhere else. The zone list here is UTM-18 to UTM-25, all of which resolve; see What actually converts for the general rule.