Question

dwg to gdb including symbology for arcgis pro

  • 23 June 2020
  • 2 replies
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I can translate a dwg to gdb for in ArcGIS Pro. I can convert the autocad colors to rgb so I can match them in Arcgis. But....

How can I translate all the symbology from the dwg-file to a gdb so I can see in ArcGis the drawing on exactly the same way as in Autocad?

Thanks!


2 replies

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Hi @sprongandre,

I don't think you can do this purely in FME. The problem is that while AutoCAD embeds a lot of symbology information in the data file, ArcGIS does not. Instead, ArcGIS users are expected to set up symbology mapping within the application, controlled by feature class attributes.

You could add the FME read symbology attributes to the output GDB schema in order to preserve the information (ie. autocad_linetype, autocad_weight), then set up your ArcGIS project to map those attributes to the appropriate symbology.

AutoCAD blocks pose a special problem. Normally symbols are written to GDB as points, then the symbol to display is set up in ArcGIS, based on the attribute values (in your case, autocad_block_name is probably best). However, the library of available symbols in ArcGIS may not match the blocks used in DWG.

Alternatively, you could explode the blocks when reading AutoCAD, which will retain the look of the original DWG block. However, it is no longer a symbol, just a collection of lines, and it loses the insertion location, which is usually quite important.

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Hi @sprongandre,

I don't think you can do this purely in FME. The problem is that while AutoCAD embeds a lot of symbology information in the data file, ArcGIS does not. Instead, ArcGIS users are expected to set up symbology mapping within the application, controlled by feature class attributes.

You could add the FME read symbology attributes to the output GDB schema in order to preserve the information (ie. autocad_linetype, autocad_weight), then set up your ArcGIS project to map those attributes to the appropriate symbology.

AutoCAD blocks pose a special problem. Normally symbols are written to GDB as points, then the symbol to display is set up in ArcGIS, based on the attribute values (in your case, autocad_block_name is probably best). However, the library of available symbols in ArcGIS may not match the blocks used in DWG.

Alternatively, you could explode the blocks when reading AutoCAD, which will retain the look of the original DWG block. However, it is no longer a symbol, just a collection of lines, and it loses the insertion location, which is usually quite important.

Hi @daveatsafe, no is also an answer ;-). But as you said I will try to map the dwg-attributes in ArcGIS, thanks!

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