Connecting to an external event source

Esri Roads and Highways allows you to connect to your business data even if it is stored and maintained outside of the geodatabase. This is important because most highway asset data is traditionally considered to be nonspatial, tabular data. Linear referencing systems (LRS) spatially enable tabular data by giving it shape and geospatial locations, but the systems that house the data may have no spatial concept whatsoever. The power of the advanced linear referencing system (ALRS) is that it allows you to set up read-only connections to your business data, not only to visualize your data in a different way, but also to integrate your business data with other enterprise data spatially.

While Roads and Highways is very flexible in what types of data it allows you to connect to, there are still some conventions you must follow to create external event layers:

• Must have a primary key.
  • Primary keys in external business tables can be either integer or text.
  • Globally unique identifiers (GUID) are converted to text.
  • Oracle integer fields are defined as a numeric field with precision but not scale; for example, Numeric(38).
• May have a date/time field.
  • If date/time is not used, full temporal viewing of event data is not supported.
  • May use a single effective date, but both from and to dates are recommended.
  • In SQL Server you must use the Datetime data type. Datetime2 is not supported.

Steps:

1. Start ArcMap and open the Catalog window or start ArcCatalog.
2. In the Catalog tree, connect to the geodatabase that contains the ALRS and LRS Network for which you want to add event layers.
3. Expand the ALRS that contains the LRS Network for which you want to add event layers.
4. Right-click the LRS Network and click New > LRS Event.

   The ALRS Event Setup wizard appears.

5. Click the browse button next to the Event Table text box.

   The Browse Data dialog box appears.
6. Double-click Database Connections.
7. Double-click Add OLE DB Connection.

   The Data Link Properties dialog box appears.
8. Choose Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle and click Next.
9. Enter the connection information for your OLE DB connection, then click OK.

   The Browse Data dialog box appears with the Oracle OLE DB connection file included.
10. Click the OLE DB connection file and click Select.

    The Enter Password dialog box appears.
11. Enter the appropriate information in the User text box and the Password text box, then click OK.

    The Browse Data dialog box shows the available external business tables.
12. Click the external business table you want to use to create an event, then click Select.

    The General Event Properties of ALRS Event Setup wizard appears with relevant inputs populated from the business table.

13. Click Next.
14. Complete the rest of the ALRS Event Setup wizard as appropriate.