HUGE Enhancements to GeoMedia Help Files

For a change of pace, I was working with GeoMedia Pro a little today. I was looking to use the REPLACE functional attribute that was introduced in 6.1.6 and had a few questions. So I went into the trusty help looking for the usage, and WOW, things have changed! The initial help appears to be much more organized and logically laid out. For instance, I receive a full description of the functional attribute. Below that each element of the functional attribute is VERY well explained. No more having to hunt and peck through the help just to understand the different elements of the functional attribute…very cool! But now for the best part – the examples. The examples actually push you off to the Intergraph Knowledge Base. Although the information appears to be a part of the Intergraph Knowledge Base that I’ve known about for a long time (and incidentally, that you need to login to access), the link in the help doesn’t require you to login.

When I clicked on the “REPLACE Example” link in the help, I was brought to a page with a whole host of examples. Here’s a copy and paste from the EXAMPLES sections:

Abstract

The following example shows how to use the REPLACE functional attribute.  This applies to GeoMedia products version 6.1.6 and later.

Code Example

REPLACE(“THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT”, “-”, “ ”) equals THIS IS EXAMPLE TEXT

REPLACE(“THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT”, “-”, “ ”, 6) equals THIS-IS EXAMPLE TEXT

REPLACE(“THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT”, “-”, “ ”, 1, 2) equals THIS-IS EXAMPLE-TEXT

REPLACE(“THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT”, “I%-”, “ ”, 1, 0, TRUE()) equals THIS IS EXAMPLE-TEXT

REPLACE(“THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT”, “i%-”, “ ”, 1, 0, TRUE()) equals THIS-IS-EXAMPLE-TEXT

Very cool!

A couple of notes:

1. Since the examples are written on a web page, it’s likely you won’t be able to just copy the example and paste it into the Functional Attributes dialog. You’ll instead need to first paste it into Notepad or some other text editor and clean-up the example. So, if you find your example not working correctly in GeoMedia, make sure to clean it up first.
2. When I logged into the Intergraph knowledge base directly (as opposed to accessing it through the help), initially I wasn’t able to find the same knowledge base entry. If you’re going to search the knowledge base directly, make sure to choose “(All GeoMedia Products)” under the “Product” section. I chose “GeoMedia and GeoMedia Professional” and didn’t get any records returned. As soon as I chose “(All GeoMedia Products)”, the same knowledge base entry I found in the help was also available in the Knowledge Base result set.

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Analyze Geometry

Sorry about the long time between posts. I’m not giving up on blogging, but, believe it or not, it does take a lot of time….

Anyhow, I’ve been playing a little with the Analysis > Analyze Geometry command. I can’t say I use it all the time, so I’m not sure when this changed. It may have been a long time ago. I’ve always found it hard to get lat/long coordinates from my state plane coordinates. Yes, I can do this one off by just clicking on the map and getting a coordinate readout from the “Precision Coordinates” dialog, but what if I wanted to have lat/long for 10,000 points. That was much harder.

You can do this with functional attributes. In fact, I posted an article on www.geomediawiki.org on how to do it. It was actually copied for the most part out of the GeoMedia online help. However you can also do this with the Analyze Geometry command.

1. Launch the command (Analysis > Analyze Geometry)
2. Choose a point feature class. If you have lines or polygons, use the CENTERPOINT functional attribute to create points from the line/area geometry.
3. When you select the point feature class, you will see the “Analysis Options” dialog populate. In the dialog you will see “Geographic Coordinate” and “Projection Coordinate”
   
4. If you check “Geographic” you will get lat/long. If you check “Projection” you’ll typically get easting/northing. NOTE: you can set the output coordinate format in the “Units and Formats…” dialog in the same Analyze Geometry dialog.
5. For points you have options for Azimuth, Bearing, Geographic Coordinates, Projection Coordinates, and Height. Height assumes you have the Z elevation populated in your geometry
6. If you work with lines, you’ll have options for Length, Azimuth, and Bearing
7. If you work with areas, you’ll have options for Area, Perimeter, and Area/Perimeter ^2

All in all, this is much easier than having to write a functional attribute.