Flow Arrows and Custom Linetypes in AIMS 2012 (aka MapGuide)

So a lot of people want to recreate the look and feel of the maps they created in AutoCAD, even though precise engineering drawings are not cartographically accurate.

That being said there is definely a way to recreate the flow arrows and Leaders from AutoCAD in AIMS.

If you have a line layer in AutoCAD you will either have to export it to SDF, SHP, Oracle Spatial, SQL Server Spatial, or any other “FDO” type data.

Connect to that data in AIMS and modify the layer style in AIMS 2012 Studio.

In the Style Lne dialog:

1. Ensure to use “Map” units
2. Chose your units (feet or meters typically)
3. Under Symbol and Style, click Add Symbol.

 4. Under Select Symbol, choose Triangle.

5.  For height, type your height in feet or if you have it as a column in your data, choose that.

6. For width, do the same as step 5.

7. Click Advanced.

8. If you want to put an arrow at the beginning of the line, enter 0 for Offset from Start, do not type anything for “from end” and set the Repeat interval to 0.

9. For Rotation, enter: 90

If you change the Offset for the End to be 0 and the beginning empty, the arrow will appear at the other end of the line.

This is very effective for AutoCAD Leaders and Flow Arrows.  Also, you can use text instead of triangle, to get a custom line.

For example: Choosing Text instead of Triangle, you can repeat the text along the line to create a custom line time

The cool thing is you can do this in Map 3D 2012 as well, for any FDO based layer.

 Also, you can save as a .LAYER file, load back into AutoCAD Map 2011 and use the Publish to MapGuide to retro your advanced layer definition into MapGuide 2011.

 Normally you would have to hack around in XML to get this to work with MapGuide 2011.

 If you have Map 3D 2012 you can now create .LAYER files with all this neat stylization and use the .LAYER retroactively.