Configuring maps

To be able to plot members on a map, you will need to specify which hierarchy is to be plotted on the map and how members will be located on the map.

This can be any hierarchy (except for the measures hierarchy) that is located on one of the axes.

Next step is to define how the members of a hierarchy are translated to geographical locations on a map.

For each level in the selected hierarchy (except any the 'All' level, if any) you will need to define where the information is obtained that designates a geographical location for a member on that level. This can be done for each level in the hierarchy by hand by selecting the level and clicking Configure... or by double clicking on the level. Details on configuring the level member mapping are provided below.

If the hierarchy has been configured appropriately on the analysis server, the Suggest... button will be enabled and the application will suggest a mapping based on information found in the cube.

To configure the mapping for a member on a level, you need to specify which information is used to determine the geographic position for a member. Depending on which information is available, you should choose one of the following types:

Depending on the method chosen, you will be presented with a number of fields that can be filled like below:

In each field, you can choose a value obtained from the name of the member (or the name of one of its parent members) or a property of the member (or one of the properties of a parent member).
In the example above, the Street is taken from the Address property of the member; the postal code is taken from the name of the parent member in the Postal Code level; the city, state and country values are taken from the names of the parent members in the respective levels.

If you had chosen Using latitude & longitude values, you would need to specify the properties or parent member names that contain the latitude and longitude values.

Note: using latitude & longitude values is preferred above using street, city, etc. values. Such values need to be geocoded before being able to plot them on a map, thus taking longer to plot and leaving a margin for geocoding errors.

Of course, on some levels, like the Country level, you will not have any information about the city or zip code etc. In these cases, just leave those fields empty.

For each field, you can alternatively choose to enter a hard coded value. This is something you would normally need to do when certain information is not available. For example, if all members in a hierarchy are always located in Canada, but the country name isn't present anywhere in the hierarchy, you could hard code the name 'Canada' in the text area on the right hand side for Country. Then all members would always be assumed to be located in Canada.

In most cases, the geocoding engine is smart enough to translate the hard coded value, regardless of the language it was entered in, to the correct geographical entry. However, the geocoding engine is biased towards the language the interface is running under, so it is a good idea to enter the values either in English or in the language the application is currently running under.

The next step is to choose how you would like the mapped members to be displayed. The members can be plotted as pins or as charts.

When other hierarchies are on the same axis the mapped hierarchy is located on, the mapped hierarchy members can occur more than once in the results. If the color/size of the pins is based on a value, the DataWarehouse Explorer will base the pin color/size on the average value of the mapped members when it occurs multiple times in the results.

For the charts to produce useful information, the axis the mapped hierarchy is located on must contain other hierarchies as well. The reason for this is that the members of the other hierarchies will serve as the data points for the charts as displayed below:


The Customer Geography hierarchy is mapped, the Education hierarchy members serve as the data points within the charts on the map.	The resulting map. In the legend we can see that the Education members have become the legend items for the charts.

When you have chosen to display the items as pins, the next step is to specify the color(s) to be used and (optionally) the tuples (i.e. row or column) that the size of the pins and color of the pins should be based on. When the pin color depends on a value, you will be allowed to specify a color range, otherwise you can only specify a single color to use.

When you have chosen to display the items as charts, the next step is to specify the tuple (i.e. row or column) that will be used to determine the data points for the charts and, optionally, the tuple (i.e. row or column) that will be used to determine the size of the charts.