Will Bentley Map use Item Types or EC attributes in the future?

" I got the impression that with Bentley CONNECT Bentley products would move towards a common attribute format, i.e. Item Types/EC attributes."

From all of the Bentley sessions I attended on the lead up to the release of the CONNECT Edition products (MicroStation, OpenRoads, etc.) I got the same impression. Every session talked about a move to a common data structure where the vertical applications could recognize each other's objects. For example a pipe object in OpenRoads will be able to be read and processed as a pipe object in Aecosim.

Based on that I was expecting that Bentley Map CONNECT was making that kind of move away from XFM. I was also looking for a move similar to OpenRoads where the MicroStation Element Template structure would be used as the basis for defining features. Revamping the GSA to use dgnlib's for storing extended map feature definitions instead of creating custom workset structures would also have been a welcome change. 

For as long as it took to get the first release of Bentley Map CONNECT out the door I have to say I am very disappointed with the lack of progress in these areas.  

As Krister said - "But it still the same program (or actually half the same program for the moment)"

Thanks for your comments.  We have investigated the use of EC Attributes and even done some prototyping.  But at this time we feel it’s best for our users to remain with XFM properties for a number of reasons.

• There is a great deal of user data available that would require conversion and update to the new EC format
• The tool we use to define the data schema (the Geospatial Administrator) would have to be adapted to use that format as well, possibly causing changes that would have to be managed by our users
• The geospatial API would also have to be adapted to take advantage of the EC format, also necessitating changes from our geospatial developers.

It’s certainly a goal to harmonize our data storage strategy and we are working towards that.  But we need to be aware of the impact on our users in making these decisions.

WRT taking advantage of some of the MicroStation based tools that use EC/item types.  Some of these would be very useful for sure, especially the reporting tools.  With display rules we do find some level of conflict.  The Map Manager is used to resymbolize features in Map and there is room for conflict between the two processes.  But this can be handled by disabling display rules while the Map Manager is running.  There may be other issues as well.

The bottom line is it is a continual dance to make Bentley Map work for the requirements of mapping and infrastructure users while also playing well with the CAD capabilities of MicroStation.  We are always interested in our users ideas on how to make this integration better.

Thanks for sharing and explaining your thoughts. I realize that this would require a lot of rewriting but that was still what I would had hoped for. 

Regards, 

Krister