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Icon Map: How to add WMS layers to your Icon Map in Power BI

Alice Drummond

The amazing free Icon Map custom visual for Power BI has the ability to display dynamic WMS layers, allowing you to visualise highly detailed raster datasets really quickly and easily. In this video blog I walk through the steps to connect to existing WMS layers in Icon Map using the publicly available NSW Koala Tree Indices dataset so you can follow along at home. For those of you who are test driving the new and improved licenced Icon Map Pro custom visual, in a future blog I walk thorough how to connect to WMS layers using Icon Map Pro.

I hope this helps you have fun exploring maps in Power BI!

🎦 Check out the video 🎦

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🤔 Why would I want to connect to a WMS layer?

Icon Map is my favourite mapping visual in Power BI, as it allows for such flexibility and customisation - including the ability to connect to a WMS hosted spatial layer. Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS Database. This is great for accessing publicly available spatial layers, detailed raster layers or contextual spatial datasets that you don't want to import into Power BI as WKT files. And the best part about it is that we can dynamically change the WMS layers using conditional formatting 🤩 For more examples or information, be sure to check out the dedicated Icon Map website here: https://icon-map.com

Let's take a look at how it works by exploring the publicly available NSW Koala Tree Indices, available HERE.

So we just need to do a bit of Mapping and DAX magic to make it work...

👇 What are the key steps:

Watch along with the video for more detail, but in summary, the key steps to displaying WMS layers in Icon Map are:

  1. Insert the Icon Map visual (making sure you have a field in Category and Size to render the visual)

  2. Host (or find) the spatial layer on a WMS (try the NSW Koala Tree Indices, available HERE if you wanted to test it out yourself)

  3. Under the visual formatting, toggle on WMS layer.

  4. Insert the WMS URL. In our example it is: https://www.lmbc.nsw.gov.au/arcgis/services/KoalaHabitat/KTI_Koala_Tree_Index/MapServer/WMSServer?

  5. Insert the WMS layer names. In our example, they are named as 0,1,2,etc.

And that's it!

You can also make the WMS layer URL or layer name dynamic using conditional formatting. For our example, we can make the layer name dynamic based on a slicer selection and concatenating the WMS Layer Names together using the CONCATENATEX DAX function and a comma delimiter.

I hope this is useful for your study - and please reach out if you have questions, or other mapping or environmental challenges in Power BI you'd like the DiscoverEI team to do a future video on.

💙 Connect

We'd love you to connect with the DiscoverEI team:

If you want to learn more about Power BI mapping visuals, then register for our Power BI 4 Enviro’s monthly meetup (https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/powerbi4enviros/), or if you’re keen on presenting at a future session then contact Christian (cborovac@discoverei.com).

Power BI Training Courses

If you’re interested in learning from our team, then we have a range of 2-day Power BI training courses available to fast-track your Power BI journey.

Click on the links below to learn more, and get in touch with the team today!

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