AutoCAD Map 3D Platform Technologies | Autodesk Developer Network

AutoCAD® Map 3D software is a flexible development platform for specialized mapping, land planning and infrastructure management applications. With AutoCAD® Map 3D as a platform, you can take advantage of industry-standard development tools and technologies when building applications. It provides direct access to a wide range of CAD, GIS, and raster data formats from multiple sources, without the need for data copying or conversion. The latest release of Map 3D offers comprehensive, customizable industry models (previously only available in Autodesk Topobase Client) for the gas, water, wastewater, and electric industries. The models provide structure to complex data, help users enforce quality standards, and improve the value of information for planning and managing infrastructure assets.

Learn more about the latest AutoCAD Map 3D features at the AutoCAD Map 3D product center.

The AutoCAD® Map 3D APIs includes ActiveX, AutoLISP, ObjectARX, Geospatial Platform and Feature Data Objects (FDO). ObjectARX and FDO API are exposed as C++ and .NET. Geospatial Platform API is exposed as .NET only.

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The Infrastructure Modeling DevBlog from ADN Team is a useful resource for software developers working with Autodesk Infrastructure Modeling technologies.
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Public discussion groups provide an open forum for sharing knowledge and receiving support. Join the AutoCAD Map 3D Developer Discussion Group. You may also find useful software development information in AutoCAD customization discussion groups.
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Learning
DevTV: Introduction to AutoCAD Map 3D Geospatial API Programming
A self-paced video tutorial demonstrating how to get started developing with the AutoCAD Map 3D Geospatial API. Download

Video : AutoCAD Map 3D API Webcast
Recorded version of the AutoCAD Map 3D 2012 API webcast. Download

DevTV : AutoCAD Map 3D Resource Explorer
A self-paced video tutorial demonstrating AutoCAD Map 3D resources and relevant Geospatial Platform API to access, edit and update them on the fly. Download

Documentation and Samples

The Docs subfolder in the AutoCAD Map ObjectARX SDK (download links below) installation directory contains Help files and Developers Guide for all the APIs, except the ActiveX (COM Automation) and AutoLISP® APIs.

Documentation for the ActiveX (COM Automation) and AutoLISP® APIs are in the Help subfolder of the AutoCAD Map.

AutoCAD Map 3D Help is available online. AutoCAD Map 3D Developer Guides and other useful resources available from the Documentation link page.

Several source code samples showing how to use the new Geospatial Platform API are included in the Map 3D ObjectARX SDK. These samples are located in the Map Samples\Platform subfolder. They work with GIS features only, i.e. data from FDO sources.

The Map 3D ObjectARX SDK also contains .NET samples in C# and VB.NET showing how to use the older APIs that work with AutoCAD (AcDb) entities only, such as Object Data, Topology, Classification, Object Filter, etc. These are in the Map Samples subfolder.

Because AutoCAD Map 3D is built on AutoCAD, you can take advantage of all the AutoCAD source code samples for ActiveX (COM Automation), VB/VBA, Visual Lisp that are the Sample subfolder of the AutoCAD Map 3D installation directory. In addition, the AutoCAD ObjectARX SDK contains AutoCAD .NET and C++ source code samples which are useful for Map 3D application development.

Tools

When developing on AutoCAD® Map 3D, we have two broad APIs to choose from - (1) the APIs based on AutoCAD entities (Object ARX, .NET, COM Automation, LISP) and (2) the Geospatial Platform API which works with features from FDO data sources only. When developing object oriented C++ applications for AutoCAD® Map 3D, you'll be working with both the ObjectARX SDK for AutoCAD and the ObjectARX SDK for AutoCAD Map 3D.

Latest release of AutoCAD Map 3D SDK is available for download. AutoCAD Map 3D Developer Documentation is available online and you can download the related API Reference documents from here.

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