Icon Map ⭐PRO⭐ How to add WMS layers to your Icon Map Pro in Power BI
Icon Map Pro is the new and improved version of Icon Map, which has loads of new features and even more mapping capability! Like the original Icon Map, the Icon Map Pro includes the ability to connect to a WMS hosted spatial layer, 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 Pro using the publicly available NSW Koala Tree Indices dataset so you can follow along at home. For those of you who are still using the original (free) Icon Map custom visual, I walk through the steps in a previous blog.
I hope this helps you have fun exploring maps in Power BI!
🎦 Check out the video 🎦
🤔 Why would I want to connect to a WMS layer?
Icon Map Pro is the new and improved version of Icon Map, which has loads of new features and even more mapping capability! To take advantage of these features it does come with a small licence fee, but you can test drive the visual using the unlicenced version to explore it. Learn more about Icon Map Pro here: https://www.iconmappro.com/
Like the original Icon Map, the Icon Map Pro includes 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. WMS allows a user to spatially visualise the dataset, but not query its features. 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 🤩
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 Pro are :
Host (or find) the spatial layer on a WMS
Identify the WMS URL. In our example it is: https://www.lmbc.nsw.gov.au/arcgis/services/KoalaHabitat/KTI_Koala_Tree_Index/MapServer/WMSServer?
Identify the WMS layer names. In our example, they are named as 0,1,2,etc.
Insert the Icon Map Pro custom visual (making sure you have a field in Category and one other data field wells to render the visual)
Under the visual formatting, Overlays and References toggle on WMS layer, and insert the WMS URL and select the layer name. And that's it!!
You can also make the WMS layer URL or layer name dynamic using conditional formatting. For this, switch the mode to 'Manual', which enables conditional formatting. For our example, we can make the layer name dynamic based on a slicer selection and concatenating the Names together using the CONCATENATEX DAX function.
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.
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