By Geoff Woodhead
I’ve had a few tasks that have required me to poke around in Map 3D recently (more on those soon). One of these tasks required me to join the data contained in a CSV file to geometry stored in an SDF. I knew that I wanted to make the data available to Map 3D via an ODBC Connection and as it was data to be joined to an existing table as opposed to a database with coordinates I needed to do this through Map Explorer. For those of you who haven’t encountered it before, ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity. It is a data connection standard whose goal is to make it possible to access any data from any application, regardless of which database management system is handling the data.
The task itself was simple enough, getting the software to do what I knew it was capable of doing was a different matter. Every time I tried to connect to a csv or access database file I was given a ‘Failed to connect’ error. It turns out this was a simple driver oversight. After a bit of research it turned out that you need to have the Microsoft Access Database Engine installed. We have recently upgraded the version of Microsoft Office that we were using to Office 365, unfortunately the Access Database Engine was not installed with Office 365. If you are not an Office 365 user but also receive the error it may be that you have a 32 bit installation of the Access Database Engine but a 64 bit installation of Map 3D.
The Solution
In either case there is an easy solution:
- Uninstall any currently installed versions of the Microsoft Access Database Engine
- Identify whether you are using the 32 bit or 64 bit version of AutoCAD Map 3D then ensure that Map 3D is closed during installation
- Download and install the version of the Microsoft Access Database Engine that corresponds to the version of your Map 3D installation (i.e. 32 bit or 64 bit) from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255
- If prompted, restart the computer. After restart you should now be able to connect to data from ODBC sources.
If you were experiencing the same issues as me, hopefully this has got you back on track. Happy databasing!