Bridge Generation and Data Maintenance Extension Overview

Once you have installed Global Mapper, you must register the extension.

Extension Registration

Global Mapper Extensions are available at no additional cost and require no special licensing or ordering from Blue Marble.
To activate any of the available Bridge Generation and Data Maintenance Extension Overview extension:

  1. Select the License Manager... from the Global Mapper Help menu.
  2. Under the Extension list of the License Manager, check 'The Bridge Generation and Data Maintenance Extension'.
  3. The extension toolbar should now appear and be ready to use.

The Bridge Generation and data Maintenance Extension contains tools for bridge generation, feature overlap checking, duplicate feature checking, and feature rotation.

Bridge Generation Toolbar


Click on the any of the above Toolbar buttons for a description of the tool's functionality, scroll down for an overview of the contents of the Bridge Generation Toolbar.

Generate Bridges - This tool will create bridge features based on user defined parameters, which are defined in the Bridge Generation Options dialog. Bridging features (roads, etc) and Bridged features (rivers, etc) can be automatically selected by overlay, feature type, and attributes. (The road features must be on top of the river features to be recognized. )

Features may also be manually selected. Various options for the generated bridges, such as buffer length, numerical ID attribute name, etc are also provided. Each generated bridge will consist of a linear feature and optional span point features.
The span points will be located where the linear bridge feature intersects the bridged feature (one point for linear bridged features, and two for areas). A section of the bridging features will be cut out to accommodate the bridge, and a copy of the cut section will be placed in a separate overlay. This will allow the user to reconstruct the original bridging feature if necessary.

Edit Bridge ID Tool - This tool allows the user to edit the Numerical ID of a bridge feature, using the Modify Bridge ID dialog. This tool allows the user to edit the Numerical ID of a bridge feature. This tool will check that no other bridge features have the specified ID. If a conflict is found, it will suggest an alternate ID. If the new ID is found to be unique, the tool will modify the ID attribute of the bridge line feature and any associated span point features.

Feature Overlap Tool - This tool will search for features with given properties (overlay, type, attribute) that overlap in the Feature Overlap dialog. For example, this tool can search for buildings that have been incorrectly placed over water features. The user may select each overlapping feature pair from the Overlap Tool, and then use the Digitizer to resolve the overlap issue. Features that are overlapping or are 'partial duplicates' will be detected using the Find Overlapping Features tool.

Duplicate Feature Tool - This tool will search for duplicate features with given properties (overlay, type, attribute), defined in the Duplicate Feature dialog, and delete them. For example, this tool could be used to find duplicate 'State Highway' line features that may have been brought into the workspace from two different data sources. This tool will allow the user to locate and delete the duplicate features. A linear tolerance setting allows the tool to locate features that have approximately the same geometry.

Drag to Rotate Tool - This tool provides a shortcut to enable the Drag to Rotate Digitizer tool, normally enabled via a popup menu. The user will select a feature to rotate, then click this button to enable the rotation tool. The feature can then be rotated by left-clicking the mouse and dragging.

In order to utilize the Bridge Generation and Maintenance tools on Global Mapper user created line and area features created using the Digitizer tool, you will need to export the User Created Features or vector layer containing the digitized features to a vector file format (ie; .shp).

Once imported back into the workspace, the digitized features and/or User Created Features layer will then be recognized by the Bridge Creation and Maintenance tools.