I had great success last week localizing a CAD drawing in J-Field. I imported the CAD file into a Page with an Unknown coordinate system. The CAD file was on a 5000,5000 coordinate system. We found two corners that were a couple of hundred feet apart and I surveyed them in. I noticed that when only the Unknown system has visibility checked on the CAD file can be viewed in the Map screen. This means that the points can be selected graphically from the Map view for localization. I localized to the two points and was then able to navigate to other corners on the site. After finding more monuments. I recomputed the localization, selecting points from the map from the imported drawing and the surveyed points.
Because of the way coordinates are handled in the database, this is an easy task for J-Field. Imported points are stored as Cartesian grid coordinates. Survey points are stored as latitude and longitude. A localization has two elements: transformation and projection. When we recompute the localization, the grid coordinates do not change, the written instructions change (the transformation) which tells the software how a grid coordinate relates to the geographic latitude and longitude coordinates. So we can recompute as often as we like without worrying about what it's doing to our coordinates.
Also, because J-Field creates nodes at endpoints of lines when linework is imported, these nodes can be selected for localization points. I've not localized a drawing before, but it worked well.
Because of the way coordinates are handled in the database, this is an easy task for J-Field. Imported points are stored as Cartesian grid coordinates. Survey points are stored as latitude and longitude. A localization has two elements: transformation and projection. When we recompute the localization, the grid coordinates do not change, the written instructions change (the transformation) which tells the software how a grid coordinate relates to the geographic latitude and longitude coordinates. So we can recompute as often as we like without worrying about what it's doing to our coordinates.
Also, because J-Field creates nodes at endpoints of lines when linework is imported, these nodes can be selected for localization points. I've not localized a drawing before, but it worked well.