I don’t generally blog about data visualisation in Power BI because it’s not my strong point, and I don’t blog about maps and geospatial analysis because I know even less about that subject and there are people like David Eldersveld who cover it so well. I do like playing around with maps though and recently I’ve been having fun with the Icon Map custom visual developed by James Dales. Probably the thing I like most about it is that so many properties accept measures as inputs, which means that you can use DAX to do some interesting things.
In this post I’ll show you a very basic example of how to display dynamically generated lines on a map – specifically, I’ll show you how to draw lines between any four cities that a user selects from a slicer. Pre-calculating all the possible combinations of cities when you load your data is not feasible because of the sheer number, so this is a scenario where being able to dynamically generate the lines between the four selected cities in DAX is really useful.
To start off, I downloaded a table with a list of cities in the UK and their latitudes and longitudes from https://simplemaps.com/data/gb-cities and then loaded this data into four identical tables in Power BI called Start, Second Stop, Third Stop and End.
I then created four slicers from the City column from these four tables, so the user can select the four different cities they want to draw lines between.
The key to making this work is to use the Icon Map visual’s ability to display geometric data in Well Known Text format; documentation on this can be found here. To achieve this I wrote some (slightly over-engineered) DAX in a measure that generates a LINESTRING object that has four lines to connect the four selected cities:
Route =
var CityTable =
{
(SELECTEDVALUE('Start'[Longitude]),
SELECTEDVALUE('Start'[Latitude])),
(SELECTEDVALUE('Second Stop'[Longitude]),
SELECTEDVALUE('Second Stop'[Latitude])),
(SELECTEDVALUE('Third Stop'[Longitude]),
SELECTEDVALUE('Third Stop'[Latitude])),
(SELECTEDVALUE('End'[Longitude]),
SELECTEDVALUE('End'[Latitude]))
}
var FilteredCityTable =
FILTER(
CityTable,
NOT(ISBLANK([Value1])) &&
NOT(ISBLANK([Value2])))
return
"LINESTRING ( " &
CONCATENATEX(
FilteredCityTable,
[Value1] & " " &
[Value2], ", ") &
")"
Here’s what the measure returns when the cities of Bath, Birmingham, Banbridge and Bradford are selected:
LINESTRING ( -2.365556 51.379444, -1.916667 52.466667, -6.26701 54.35091, -1.75 53.783333)
Finally, I dragged this measure in the Icon URL / WKT / SVG well in the Icon Map visual (NB: you need to use the version of the visual from http://www.icon-map.com/ and not the version from AppSource for now for this to work). Here’s the result:
You can download the sample pbix file here.
There are far more practical things you can do with this: for example, Mimoune Djouallah has a great blog post here on how to use Well Known Text in Icon Map to display 1.2 million points on a map. Let me know if you have a real-world application for this by leaving a comment.
That’s great, I had no idea it’s even possible to do that. Then again, I’ve hardly ever used a map on a report. Thank you for sharing, that has lots of practical applications.
Chris – Thanks for sharing… I have always felt there is lots of potential in this sort of thing, specifically in the Engineering & Construction industry. We are always marking up G&A maps with jobsite “areas”. Having a map showing these areas and KPI values for each would be a big win… Instead of drawing on a “Country, State, City” map, we need to be able to draw on an Engineering Drawing map. It’s the same concept, just different plot points…
I’m using the icon-map to track the movement of devices inside a building, the floor is drawn using WKT geometry objects stored inside an Azure SQL, the longer an device is at the same place (averaging lat/long) the stronger the pulse. A fun and very simplified version of this is here https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Happy-Birthday-Power-BI/td-p/1263059 This is one of my favorite visuals 🙂
I bet there’s a use for this with the new Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Thanks for sharing this interesting content. Yet as I try to copy the same in the measure I face the error on the “amp” which is not known / not a function. I appreciate your help, so I can try this out.
I tried the solution shown here, however I don’t seem to get it to work. Can you reupload the example file and eventually the version name of the Icon map? Thank you.
The problem with this solution is that it requires a third-party, closed-source non-Microsoft certified visual. It requires granting them access to your data. This is unacceptable for most corporate environments.