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** This article is a work in progress **
The creation of new project schemas requires initial planning. The following is a suggested workflow that may be helpful to get you started.
"Save early, Save often"
1. Define Geometry Types: Point, Line, or Polygon
Geometry can be one of three geometry types: Points, Lines, or Polygons. Review your data requirements and ensure that each feature can be defined as one of these geometry types. For example:
2. Define Categories to organize the features
While not necessary, categories can help organize the features for ease of use and navigation. An example of a category is Utilities which might contain the following features: Water Mains, Hydrants, Powerlines. And the category BaseMap might contain Rivers, Lakes, Parcels, Parks, Road Centerlines.
3. Define domains
A domain is a list of pre-defined values for feature properties. For example, when placing a parcel, you might have a property called Zoning that can be one of the following: Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Educational, Other. Creating a domain list called ParcelZoning would provide these five options as a picklist during feature placement. The contents of a domain list can be defined manually or be queried from a database.
4. Create Feature definitions
Each feature in your project can be defined in the Features node found under All Users which makes them available to every workspace in the project. At this point, the feature definition will contain the name, geometry type, display name, the category it belongs to, an optional description, the zoom min and max settings and a few other settings.
When a feature is created, the Symbology node is made available for setting the appearance of the feature. Defining the feature symbology can be easily deferred towards the end of your project design.
5. Define Feature properties
At this point, the foundation of your project has been created. The next step is to define the feature properties which needs to be done with though and care. Feature properties are the containers for your business attributes, for example, a parcel polygon feature might have the following properties: LotID, RollNumber, LegalDescription, Owner, MarketValue, LastSoldDate. A streetlight point feature might have properties such as LightID, KW_Rating, ReplacementCost, StreetID, TypeCode.
In addition to determining each property, its unique details need defining. This includes the property type and its associated settings which are found in the property definition tab.
NOTE: Care should be taken to define each property correctly - in some cases it may not be possible to change property details after the features have been created and used in a Bentley Map project. This is especially true for the data type and database properties.
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Now navigate to the Properties node under the feature name and add properties. This is not a required step, if the feature does not have any properties, then you do not need to do this. If you do not define properties for the feature, then you will not be able to create PBS or PBA definitions for the feature.
Now edit the symbology properties for the feature. Notice that the list of symbology properties varies by the feature geometry type you chose when creating the feature. Point geometry (text or cell) includes those symbology properties you would expect with text (text style and PBA) or cell (scale, angle, type, name, library). Linear and Polygon geometry contain the same types of properties. Also notice that no matter what the geometry type, you get some basic symbology properties (level, weight, color, etc). This is a good place to add your PBS settings.
You are real close to finishing a basic schema. Repeat steps 4-6 for each feature you want to create.
Now for each feature created add the placement metadata (highlight the feature, right click, and select Add ...... Placement metadata).
Now go down into the User interface and add the command manager items (this is where you can really diverge the definition. If you created different workspaces, one for editing and one for reviewing, then you probably need to do this in the workspace node and not in the "ALL Users" node. This should be a separate topic since there are different routes this can take).
Now create the workspace. This will allow you to store the definitions, resources, etc. needed to run this schema in any of the Geospatial products that use the schema.
Now export your workspace.
To test the workspace, select the workspace node and click on the Run tool. If you are not satisfied with the results, go back and redefine and retest.