Bentley MicroStation Design (V8) Writer Parameters

Specifies how FME feature coordinates are interpreted and converted into Units of Resolution (UOR). The UOR (which is defined by the seed file) is the smallest increment of precision to which the drawing data can be stored in the system.

  • Master Units – UORs are converted into master units.
  • Sub Units – UORs are converted into subunits.
  • UORs – UORs are written as raw UOR coordinates.

Controls whether or not fill linkages will be written out for ellipses, shapes, and solids.

In version 8, the feature type is always taken as the level name. When the Write Tags parameter is set to Yes in the FME Workbench writer parameters, then the feature type will also be the tagset name.

For more information, see

Set the location of the seed file.

The seed file controls whether or not the output file is two- or three-dimensional, and sets the models, global origin, coordinate system, and unit information of the destination file.

Optionally specify a design file cell library, which contains definitions of symbols that can be placed in the output design file.

Note  If a translation to design file fails because of insufficient ground range, FME detects this and will automatically supply these settings for the next translation.

Spatial

Coordinate systems may be extracted from input feature data sources, may come predefined with FME, or may be user-defined. FME allows different output and input coordinate systems, and performs the required coordinate conversions when necessary.

How FME Processes Coordinate Systems in the Workspace

If a coordinate system is specified in both the source format and the workspace, the coordinate system in the workspace is used. The coordinate system specified in the source format is not used, and a warning is logged. If a source coordinate system is not specified in the workspace and the format or system does not store coordinate system information, then the coordinate system is not set for the features that are read.

If a destination coordinate system is set and the feature has been tagged with a coordinate system, then a coordinate system conversion is performed to put the feature into the destination system. This happens right before the feature enters into the writer.

If the destination coordinate system was not set, then the features are written out in their original coordinate system.

If a destination coordinate system is set, but the source coordinate system was not specified in the workspace or stored in the source format, then no conversion is performed. The features are simply tagged with the output system name before being written to the output dataset.

For systems that know their coordinate system, the Coordinate System field will display Read from Source and FME will read the coordinate system from the source dataset. For most other input sources, the field will display Unknown (which simply means that FME will use default values). In most cases, the default value is all you'll need to perform the translation.

You can always choose to override the defaults and choose a new coordinate system. Select More Coordinate Systems from the drop-down menu to open the Coordinate System Gallery.

Changing a Reprojection

To perform a reprojection, FME typically uses the CS-MAP reprojection engine, which includes definitions for thousands of coordinate systems, with a large variety of projections, datums, ellipsoids, and units. However, GIS applications have slightly different algorithms for reprojecting data between different coordinate systems. To ensure that the data FME writes matches exactly to your existing data, you can use the reprojection engine from a different application.

Note  To use this feature, you must have a supported GIS application installed on your system (for example, Esri ArcGIS®).

To change the reprojection engine, Select Workspace Parameters > Spatial > Reprojection Engine. In the example shown, you can select Esri (but the selection here depends on your installed applications):

For more information, see the links below:

Advanced

Specifies how you want to store the two-point line features.

  • Type 3 Elements – Two-point line features are stored as type 3 line elements.
  • Type 4 Elements – Two-point line features are stored as type 4 line elements.

If selected, indicates that the coordinates of named cells written to the destination should be scaled from the coordinate space of the cell model to the coordinate space of the seed model (which is used as the destination).

This affects shared and unshared cells that do not have a cell size set (that is, igds_cell_size, or igds_cell_size_x and igds_cell_size_y). This behavior is similar to the setting for True Scale when placing cells in MicroStation.

  • Yes: This parameter indicates that XML-based Feature Modeling (XFM) store features may be preserved in the destination dataset, from the seed file, and not written from features. In this case, no matching of reference between XFM related elements is done. This option is intended to preserve the form of xfmstore elements in a Design file-to-Design file translation.
  • No:  XFM store elements will be created from any features with an igds_type of igds_xfmstore, which the writer receives.

Note that this is currently only applicable to Select Series 1 XFM writing using linkages and xfmstore elements as reference elements.

The default cell used in place of any cells requested but not found in the cell library.

If set, this parameter indicates that text features may use the Resource (RSC) font file specified to assist in text element placement, size, and range calculation.

Note  If this parameter is not specified, and Enhanced Text Writing Precision is enabled, then FME will attempt to load the font.rsc file from the default MicroStation Connect installation path.

This only applies to text features with RSC font IDs specified in the igds_font attribute, and which are found in the specified RSC file to be symbolic fonts. If this parameter is not specified, text elements with symbolic RSC fonts will have their placement, size, and range estimated.

  • Yes (default) – Text elements will be written via a proxy for improved insertion point accuracy.
  • No – Text elements will be written using the legacy method.