Importing Shape files to AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 (2008 problems fixed?)

Further to my previous articles regarding the problems with importing shape files into AutoCAD Map 3D 2008. So what's changed with 2009...

As mentioned previously the issues that I had encountered were due to incorrect naming of field names in the DBase (.dbf) part of the Shape data.

Incorrect, in that the field names exceeded the 10 character naming limit, and when truncated to the first 10 characters, resulted in duplicate field names.

So what does AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 do, when I try to import my faulty shape data...

As shown above, AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 now finds the error and provides an error message telling me what the problem is, and which file has the problem...

Comments

[xiao]

Thanks a lot. I got big help from your article. I appreciate your generous.

[jim sladge]

OK, you have nicely diagnosed the problem with Civil 3D 2009. Now how to fix it - ie get Civil 3D to bring in the shapefiles, errors and all.

I do not want Civil3D to be a tool for finding faulty shapefiles, but instead to read shapefiles.

Note-earlier versions of AutoCAD Map did not have a problem with the same files.

[John Benstead]

Hi Jim
Thank you for your comments.
I appreciate that you just want to get the data imported, however, although previous versions may appear to have imported the data, they would have only imported the data that was not faulty. i.e. fields exceeding the 10 character naming limit were ignored and the attributes not imported at all. This of course may not have been an issue, as long as you are not interested in those attributes.
With all that said, I still believe we have the best solution to date, it just doesn't suit us all.
Best regards
John Benstead