How to choose between using a data root or adding data directly

We recommend data roots if you want to add a large amount of data to LuciadFusion Studio. LuciadFusion adds the data asynchronously by crawling all the files and folders in the data root directory. To watch the progress of this process, you can check the status of the crawl job for the data root.

We recommend that you add data directly if you want to add a smaller amount of data. When you add data directly, you add it one data source by one. This is a synchronous operation.

If you use data roots, you can automate the process of handling changes to the data. If data is added, removed or updated in the data root, you can just run the crawl job again so that LuciadFusion picks up those changes. To fully automate that process, you can schedule crawl jobs to run at a certain time.

If you added data directly, and your data isn’t in a data root, you can’t automate these processes, but you do have more control over your data. You remove data manually from LuciadFusion Studio if you want to delete it. If your data has changed, you refresh it manually in LuciadFusion Studio. If you get new geospatial data, you add it manually in LuciadFusion Studio.

The way you add the data decides how LuciadFusion Studio indexes it.

When you add data directly, LuciadFusion Studio indexes only the indicated file. If the data has any child data, LuciadFusion Studio doesn’t examine the child data and doesn’t add it to its data overview. The data you add is typically the entry point file for the child data, and contains all the required metadata. The supporting files, such as the .ref georeference file, are automatically detected when the entry point file is indexed.

When you use a data root, LuciadFusion Studio crawls all files in the data root. Because the crawler needs to determine if data has changed in a future run, it indexes all files related to a data source. That is why LuciadFusion Studio picks up and adds all child data.

This means that adding data directly can be significantly faster for data that consists of many individual files, or has a lot of child data. This is the case for OGC 3D tiles datasets, for example. They can have child tilesets and may consist of many supporting files, such as B3DM or PNTS data. If you add OGC 3D Tiles directly, LuciadFusion Studio only indexes the tileset file that you specify. If you use a data root, the crawler indexes all child tilesets and supporting files, which takes longer.

The downside to adding a data file directly is that LuciadFusion Studio isn’t aware of any related files. This means that when you serve directly added data from a file server service, the service doesn’t serve all related files. If you serve data that comes from a crawled data root, a file server service also makes all related files available.