Connecting to the SAME Row in an ODBC connected Database

Exactly.

 :-)

Calendars — Seasons — Marketing

AlanH:

As an international company it would be more useful if Bentley gave this information out in Month/Year Format rather than by 'Season'

Keith:

True enough. Not everyone runs on the calendar year.

Might his comment not have more to do with out-of-phase seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres?

Regards, Jon Summers
LA Solutions

True enough. Not everyone runs on the calendar year. We are expecting the release towards the end of June this year.

In your example below, you want to associate a series of features with a record that indicates when those features may have been collected. In XFM you could define some simple properties for each feature with an ID (because it's often a good idea but not necessary) and a property that indicates when the data was collected. These properties could be contained in the database as they are now. In a separate table, you would have a record with a unique ID and any other information describing the origin of that data. When the join tool is available, you would simply join the property from the feature to the unique ID in the data origin record. You could then easily review the source of any graphic element.
There's nothing to prevent you from using the duplicate linkage mechanism as always in MicroStation. But hopefully the above method will make it straightforward to model your data easily with Bentley Map and use any related data in your database.

Ok.....thanks again for your reply Keith. It's good to get some feedback. I had sent this query to Bentley (and received a Ticket Number) half way through January and I still haven't received any reply.

Firstly, when is the next release of Bentley Map due that will have the Table Join Feature that you mentioned? Note: By way of feedback, as an international company it would be more useful if Bentley gave this information out in Month/Year Format rather than by 'Season'. :-)

Secondly, I think I understand how the Join might work but would it be possible for you to give an example?  Again, I would think the ability to easily have 'data source' as an easily defined Feature Attribute (and not necessarily a one to one) would be a VERY useful feature.

 

:-)

 

My apologies! Certainly what you are asking is a valid application. Essentially a one-to many relationship. It is something MicroStation has supported for a long time with the idea of duplicate linkages. Here's my thinking on the subject.
As I mentioned, In Bentley Map we try to enforce the idea of one graphic feature to one database record. That minimizes the external application work required to maintain the link between what are two separate database systems, MicroStation and the RDBMS. It also more closely approximates the idea of a spatial database such as Oracle Spatial.
The idea of a one to many relationship is common in RDBMS and has many applications as you point out Our preference would be to let the database handle those relationships instead of an external application such as Bentley Map. That should simplify the programming required to maintain the database links and prevent the possibility of orphan records.
But how do you access the other tables in a MicroStation session? Currently it is not so easy as custom SQL statements would be needed in the XFM project. However with our upcoming Bentley Map release we will support the idea of join tables, in which you can join an external table to an existing Map feature. That way, reviewing the feature will also access the records from the external table.
I hope this helps and I hope it simplifies the setup and maintenance of your application and data.