Performing "MGE-like" Complexing Inside GeoMedia

We’re still a MGE shop here at San Jose Water for much of our data maintenance. So, I’ve been starting to move some of our more static line/centroid “that should be polygon” data layers from MGE, to a GeoMedia Pro-maintained Oracle Locator database. This will then allow us to actually fill our polygons.

For those that have not used MGE, it doesn’t typically work with area/polygon features. Instead you draw lines into the system and then place a centroid in the closed line work. You then put all of your intelligence on the centroid. The model works very well when trying to maintain topology. Furthermore, I’m told that if you’re only working inside of the MGE environment, MGE can handle spatial analysis without ever needing to have polygons (however can’t say I ever tried to use the analytical functions inside of MGE). Yet again these days it’s getting harder and harder to find people that have…. Anyhow, I digress.

So, I’ve moved the lines and centroids for our Stations feature class into Oracle and then used the Insert > Area by Face… command to create true polygons from my line work. That worked great…but unfortunately these polygons were now “dumb” polygons as the GIS attributes were still on the centroid.

So I was planning on using the aggregation command and then copying the data across to migrate the attribute data from the centroid to its respective polygon. However, before I started, I remembered a custom command I pulled down from the Intergraph Synergy site at one point in time. The name of the command is “Area Centroid Integrator”. From the description file that came with the command:

Area Centroid Integrator is a sample command that allows the user to copy selected attributes from a centroid to the area feature class which contains the centroid.

Anyhow, I ran that command and viola – the primary key (MSLINK) from my centroid was automagically copied to my polygon feature class. Couldn’t have been simpler! In case you’re interested in trying the command for yourself, it can be downloaded from this link.

Please note that the command is designed for GeoMedia/Pro 6.0. Make sure to read the Description.txt file for installation directions. Otherwise, if you’d rather use the unsupported (though I’ve never had a problem with it) GeoMedia Custom Command Installer, it can be downloaded from this site as well.