From the course: AutoCAD Map 3D 2022 Essential Training

Creating object data definitions - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Map 3D 2022 Essential Training

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Creating object data definitions

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at object data tables. They're used to store your own custom properties. Every feature in your DWG can have an object data attached, and this starts with the creation of an empty place to put this data, the object data table itself. So let's create an empty one now. Inside a brand new DWG, I'm going to go to Map Setup ribbon and click the Define Object Data. Once I'm inside here, I can click a Brand New Table and I'm going to call this table streets, because this table will contain data that I'm going to eventually attach to different street segments that I draw inside of AutoCAD Map. They could be P lines or just lines or so on. So I'm going to call the table streets, and then I'm going to choose the first column. The first column I'm going to call it feat ID or feature ID. The feature ID is a unique number that I'm going to sign each segment of road. So it can be a integer, so one, two, three, four, a character, anything you can type on your keyboard, a point which is x, y and a real, which is basically a decimal number. So 88.3 for example, is a real. Feature IDs are typically integers, so we're going to pick on integer and we'll just say unique ID for street. And the default I'm going to set to zero. If anyone attaches this table to an object, it'll automatically just populate with a zero so you'll know to change it later on. So I'll click Add. So now we have an empty table called streets with one column in it, feature ID and it's an integer. Now to add another feature, all I have to do is type over the word feat ID and this time I'm just going to call it street. It'll be the street name. So it's not going to be an integer 'cause that's a number. I want it to be a character, so you can type anything you want. So I pick character and we'll just say, this is the street name. And I'm going to leave the default blank. So this is a street, it's a character, the description is street name, there's no default value for the street names, and I click Add, and you'll see that I now have a table called streets with two object data fields, feat ID and street. Let's click Okay and Close. So now you can't see it inside the drawing, there's nowhere that shows you that there's some empty object data sitting around. You actually have to go back into Map Setup, click on Define Object Data to see it listed there. Now once it's there, we can use it to attach to data. Now I don't have any data in this empty drawing, but if I did, I could use this table and actually populate it. Or if I don't want this table anymore, I can hit Delete, or if I want to add more columns to it, I can click Modify and just type in a different column name here and click Add. But either way, I've created an empty table that now can be used to attach object data to any feature inside of AutoCAD. You've learned to create this empty object data table that will eventually contain all your attribute data that can attach to AutoCAD features.

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