Kevin,
Some ideas that strike me:
In FME while writing dgn files you have the option to
Compute Seed File Parameters under Parameters for DGN writer.
Check this box if you want the FME to scan the input data and automatically compute and use optimal parameters for the input data. You may want to use this setting if the seed file you selected does not provide a large enough real-world area for the output data. You can check to see if this help resolve your requirement.
Alternatively you can use a V7 seed file but if the UoR and GO are the same for all the files that you are converting from V8 to V7 then you can enable the Override Global Origin and Override Units and key-in the values (if they are constant for all the V8 files) in the corresponding boxes.That way your V7 files will be set to UoR and GO as that of the V8 file.
In case the GO and UoR are not constant for all the V8 files and you would like FME to pick them up from a look up list for each V8 file you are converting you can set these parameters for your V7 DGN writer to look at values (may be picked from a spreadsheet) or you could use a ValueMapper to map the published parameters of V7 writer to that of spreadsheet columns.
Regarding element linkages can you explain what you mean by not valid linkages?
Happy FME -ing :-)
Cheers
SRG
In MicroStation V8 the cell name is added to the header element as a user (string) linkage. FME does not recognoize this as a valid type of linkage so it aborts the translation process. I was looking for a way to have FME ignore these types of linkages. I did come up with a work around for this problem; it just is not very elegant nor anything I would want to rely on in the future.