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Introduction

Given that we have WinCan VX at our fingertips for handling all of our data and WinCan Map VX as a connected and/or standalone GIS application, we should where possible take full advantage of the features in WinCan Map to help keep the data organised and make life simple for the site teams doing the inspections.

Working with Background Tiles

Background tiles (or Ordnance Survey MasterMap  layers) are extremely useful for showing just the general geometry and layout of the road and the surrounding areas, and they can usually be relied on quite comfortably for a reasonable level of accuracy.

Obtaining these files can be difficult, but they are usually made available by the client on request and on acceptance of a user agreement that will limit your use of the files to only work carried out on behalf of the client.  They can also be created from topographical survey CAD files.

When you first load a polygon background tile of this type, it will have no colours applied and will be all grey by default.  This is because there is no theme applied to the shapefile as was described in the section Shapefiles.

Using good visual themes to make the background tiles user friendly.

Right-click on the layer in the Layers Panel and select the ‘Show Data’ option.  A table will open at the bottom of WinCan Map which shows all of the attribute data for the polygon objects in the shapefile.  One (maybe more) of these will describe different types of structure or environment.  In this example, the field ‘DESCGROUP’ describes this nicely:

Identifying the field that contaons that data that can be used to control the colours.

To apply a colour scheme, load the shapefile in WinCan Map using the ‘Add layer’ button, and then right click on the layer in the Layers Panel to ‘Show Properties’.

Now select the Area segment of the theme (it is the area of the shapes that we would like to fill with nice colours), and click on the ‘Wizard’ button:

Activating the Wizard on the Area parameter.

Then, click Next on the following Rendering Wizard splash screen with ‘Simple Classification’ selected, and on the next screen select the attribute field heading that contains the useful description, and select the ‘Full Scan’ option:

Selecting the layer attribute for colours.

Hit the Next button on the next splash screen, keep the default options, like this:

Mark the fix for the areas by colour and include in the legend.

Keep clicking Apply and Ok and close the Layer Properties panel until you see that the shapefile layer has a load of random colours applied and a legend in the Layers Panel describing which colour is which object type.

These colours will not be very user friendly, but they can now be very easily modified to suit yourself and the hard work of making complex data queries has been done for you.

You should now have something like this, although most likely not the same colurs as here because Map selects them randomly:

The random colours selected by Wincan Map VX.

Finally, re-open the Layer Properties and work through each of the theme part down the left-hand side and assign a colour of your choice to each layer until you have a nice colour scheme.

Choosing your own colours to replace the default ones.

Finally, save the theme from the Layer Properties panel.  The default save name and file location of the theme file will be the same name and folder as the shapefile layer that it is applied to, and the file extension will be .shp.ttkstyle

The beauty of this file is that now you can re-use it with any background polygon shapefile that has the same structure as the first one.  To re-use this file, all you have to do is copy it and paste it in the same file directory as the next background file you are using, and make sure that it has the same name as the shapefile before the file extension.  Now, when you ‘Add Layer’ in WinCan Map VX, the theme you created will load automatically with the layer and all is taken care of.

This is a really powerful tool for helping out the site crews.  They do not have the time or inclination to do this kind of stuff, and 20 minutes spent in the office doing this once, will help them no end, because you will have saved the background layer in the [Project Folder] -> [Misc] -> [Data Exchange] -> [Map] folder with the theme file in the same folder and with the same name, so that when they click on ‘Add Layer’ in Map, the file is just there, ready to load.

Information on good data management inside the WinCan project folder is given in the section Keeping Your Data Organised.

Creating a Scheme Extents Layer

It is common in contract negotiations for clients to issue a marked up drawing to contractors showing the section of road and the extents of the work to be carried out, usually accompanied by some comments regarding which parts of the network need to be inspected, as described the in the section Introduction to Introduction to DDMS Surveying.

The exact format of this can vary from client to client, but essentially it is usually a red line on the drawing around the section of the road to be inspected and reproducing this in WinCan Map VX is very quick and very useful for the Site teams and office processors.

If the scheme extents drawing is available as a CAD or .dxf file then it is quite easy to extract the ‘red line’ and simply load it in WinCan Map, but in this example, we will create it from scratch as a new shapefile.

In most cases, the most user-friendly way to create this shape is as a polygon shapefile (a file of closed shapes) as described in the section Shapefiles.

As an example, we will describe a package of work which is:

• On the M25 motorway, 1,000m either side of Junction 12 (the M3 junction), all assets.

• The M3 motorway at the same junction, 500m either side of the junction, central reserve only.

• Excluding slip roads.

In order to do this, we are going to need a good quality background file as described in section Working with Background Tiles on this page.  Here is what the area looks like:

The limits of the work.

Here, we have drawn 2 circles which are both plotted at the very centre of the junction (where the M25 and M3 cross over), and one is 500m radius (for the M3 part of the works, and the other is 1,000m radius (for the M25 part for the works).

To do this, first load the background tile and apply your favourite theme as described in the section Shapefiles.

Next, click on the drop-down arrow on the Layers button in the Home ribbon and select New Layer -> New Polygon Layer:

Create new polygon layer.

Now, you will be prompted to give the layer a name (suggest you call it ‘Scheme_Limits’) and save it in the default suggested folder, because as described previously, this is the default folder that the CCTV team are presented with when they click the ‘Add Layer’ button.

You are creating a new virgin shapefile here, and shapefiles must always have at least one attribute field, so in the next screen, create a field:

• Field name = ID

• Type = String

• Length = 20

Setting the new layer attributes.

Click on the Add Field button and then the green tick.  You have now created a polygon shapefile that will be visible in your Layers list on the left-hand side of WinCan Map VX that has a single attribute ‘ID’ which we can use to describe the scheme extents that we are going to create.  We do not need any other fields at this time.

Now, select the new layer, and then ‘Draw Circle’ in the Edit panel of the Tools ribbon and click in the centre of the junction.  You will be prompted to enter the circle radius, so in this example, we will enter the value 1,000 to draw a circle of radius 1,000m.  The result is this:

Draw Circle reults in the new layer.

The circle is grey because this is the default theme for polygon layers, and as described in the section Shapefiles, we can very easily set the fill colour of the layer theme to be ‘Transparent’, the outline colour to be something user-friendly, and save the theme (which of course saves the theme file in the same file directory as the shapefile itself.  All these techniques are described in the section Shapefiles.

After plotting the 2^nd circle at 500m radius an defining a good theme. We end up with the result displayed earlier, so we are already quite a long way down the road of creating this Scheme Extents shapefile.

The next step is to create another polygon layer (suggest you call it Scheme_Extents) in exactly the same way that you did previously and draw a freehand polygon (or 2 in this case because of the extents on the 2 different motorways) that align with the scope of work.

To do this, click on the ‘Draw Polygon’ button in the Tools ribbon and roughly draw out the shape of the extents, by clicking one point at a time up one side of the road and back down the other until the polygon is closed.  When you are happy with the shape, right-click on the screen and select ‘End Edit’.  Super accuracy is not important here because we can fine tune it at a more zoomed level later:

Two polygon layers describing the scheme extents.

See now the thin polygon strips, one on each road.

Now we can zoom in much closer and use the ‘Edit Shape’ button in the Tools ribbon to fine tune the shape of the polygon so that it fits nicely with your scheme extents.  In this example, the final step would be to delete the 2 circles because they are no longer needed, and save the Sceme_Extents shapefile in the standard default project file location and with the theme file in the same directory, so that the site teams can load it easily and quickly.

The result looks like this:

A user-friendly scheme extents file.

Marker Posts

Marker posts are the red and white posts that we see commonly along the sides of motorways with some text on.

Example Marker Post.

These are usually spaced every 100m and describe a unique position along the road on both sides of the carriageway.

In the previous example, we used some text to describe the extents of the work to be carried out, but in this example, we will use marker posts, so the scope of work now is:

• M3, P33/7B to P34/5B, verge only.

• M3, P33/7A to P34/5A, verge only.

In order to work in this way, you will need a point shapefile that contains the required marker post locations and identifiers, and as described previously, you may need to request this from the client.  Once you have it, you can load it in WinCan Map and create a theme to show the data effectively:

Marker post shapefile data.

As described already, use the ‘Info Tool’ or the ‘Show Data’ option on the layer to figure out which attribute field in the shapefile contains the information that you would like to filer on.  In this example, the field is called ‘BD’.

Now, with the layer selected, use the ‘Select by Attribute’ tool in WinCan Map VX to define the objects that you need to find, like this:

Select by Attribute.

After clicking on the Select button, hit the green ‘Close’ button which will close the panel and on your screen you will see the required points highlighted, like this:

Selected objects.

What you do from here is up to you.  You can now use this info to create a scheme extents polygon layer as described in the previous section, or you can export the selected points to a new shapefile with only these points included, or you can simply use some of the other menu options in the ‘Select’ dropdown list items to ‘Invert Selection’, and then ‘Hide Selection’ which will result in only your selected items being visible on screen, like this:

Show only the selected objects.

As a last step, we can recreate what we have already learned, and create 2 polygons for this scope of work that align with the marker post positions, and include the verges (i.e. not the central reservation) of both sides of the motorway, and approximately half of the carriageway, like this:

Scheme extents defined.

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