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Personalize your geomapping experience in SAP Design Studio

vincentdechandon
Contributor
‎11-10-2016 2:16 PM

Hi fellow readers!

You know I really enjoy to tell a story when I write blog posts, but this one is going to be more formal, and talk about the new release of Galigeo For Design Studio, stamped 2.4.
If you are not familiar with it already, Galigeo For Design Studio is an advanced mapping extension for Design Studio, perfectly integrated that lets you leverage strong geomapping features directly into Design Studio.
In a few words, it makes maps and location data a more critical component in dashboards and custom applications.

I've already posted previous blog posts regarding older release of Galigeo For Design Studio over the SCN, you can find them here:

❶ Advanced geomapping and ESRI Support in Design Studio
❷ Make your first steps into geomapping with Galigeo For Design Studio (this one is a bit more dated)


Just before getting started, note that Galigeo also offers a consitent geoammping experience accros SAP Webintelligence and SAP Lumira as well.
Now, let's dive a little bit deeper into this new version of Galigeo For Design Studio.
The global interface has not really changed since the previous version, here is what it looks from a designer perspective.


❶ Galigeo For Design Studio extension, in the Galigeo Components group. Basically, you just drag and drop it on the WISIWYG view.
❷ The map behaves like any other visual component. You can place it wherever you want, resize it, hide it, make its container responsive, link to other visualizations and much more, ...
❸ The user-friendly UI to configure and customize map and layers, is accessible from the Additional Properties panel.


Customize your maps to meet your business requirements

With this new version, you can now bring your own basemap into the extension.
Here's a silly example below.

Afew days ago, I played around with a small dataset containing information and metrics about Metallica concerts all around the world. I then imported it in Design Studio. To make my dashboard in line with Metallica, I've taken a "lava" basemap (looks badass isn't it?).

Here's what it looks like at the end:



You can import any basemaps follwing the "OSM-like" standard (OSM stands for the well-known OpenStreetMap).
Here are some examples if you want to play by yourself.


You can also leverage your basemap coming from ESRI ArcGIS, Online and On-Premise included.It works exactly the same than the OSM-like basemaps, just paste the URL into the correct property, and Galigeo For Design Studio will take care of everything.

Here's a screenshot using basemaps defined in ArcGIS. You can now easily do more with your ESRI investment.You can now easily do more with your ESRI investment.

Leverage any custom geodata, no matter where it comes from

Other than just the basemap options, one of the strengths of Galigeo For Design Studio is the possibility to add your custom geodata.

You can create layers based on geodata coming either from ESRI ArcGIS Online or On-Premise, or from static files : geojson like in native geomaps, but also shapefiles.

The import of any geodata is accomplished in just a few easy steps, basically all the technical parts are abstracted by Galigeo For Design Studio. It's plug-n-play, to let you focus on your business.

Below is an example that retrieves some geodata from an ESRI On-Premise Server.


As you can see, it's just copy-pasting a webservice URL, then defining which BI dimension to be used to create a joint between the BI and the geodata, and you can start mapping your KPIs on the freshly-added layer on the map.

When creating layers, you can completely customize the look and feel: the type of representation, the colors, the size, the shape, ...

For example, below is the same dataset mapped on a layer, but illustrated in different manners, just to showcase you have access to a lot of options to configure your layers.
All the customization is done without the need of previous knowledge in geomapping, using the user-friendly interface in the Design Studio client.



Here is a live example showing the user-friendly UI, and how easy it is to switch between representations.


Then, when you have defined the representation that best fits you data, you can go deeper and continue the customization process to meet your specific requirements, like shown below.


Of course, the examples above show how to configure a layer based on points, but all the customization will also be available even if your layers is made of polygons, or lines.

For example, you can display polygons as "geobubbles" (also known as proportional symbols).
In this case, the centroid of each polygon is calculated by Galigeo For Design Studio on the fly, and used for positionning the bubble on the map.


Here is another concrete example with lines (if you live or use to go to New York, you will have recognize the New York Subway lines!), mixed with clusters, indicating the number of employees in a certain station.
The most important to remember, is that you can basically represent everything you want on the map: custom territories, administrative boundaries, railways, roads,telco networks, pipelines, ...


Drive your operational insights from the map

Business Intelligence is not only building eye-catching charts on top of good-looking UI.

As Design Studio allows the application designer to really customize the experience of end-users, Galigeo For Design Studio follows the same philosophy and let the author define its custom actions, regarding what happens on the map.

For example, when a end-user will select data from the map using advanced selection tools (free draw, isodistance, drive-time, ...), the designer can decide what will happen: will a datasource be filtered? will a chart see his data selection being switched? or is it just a bunch of text that are going to be updated with the selected values? Or why not all three at the same time?
You get the point, it's up to you to decide.


Galigeo For Design Studio also lets you build your hierarchies, even if they are not already defined in your dataset, and then benefit from drilling-down and drilling-up through this hierarchies.

Same as selection like foresaid, the designer can define custom actions upon drilling-down and drilling-up.
Here is an example of a sample application, that leverage the built-in drill-down feature.


With this feature, you are not forced to follow a hard-coded workflow like Country to Regions to Cities, (You really can do what you want Custom Regions to Stations to Railways to Sensors, for example).

There are also even more advanced actions a designer can take advantage of, and that open doors to infinite possibilities.

For example, one can define a custom behavior when a map is getting panned or zoomed.
In the example below, I took advantage of it, in order to synchronise two maps together.
When I pan and/or zoom on the left map, the same movement is applied to the right map. And it just took me one line of scripting into Design Studio to achieve this (I will let you find which one)!


Of course, there is a lot more new features to be discovered in this new release, and well, it's up to you to find them!

Thanks for reading this until the end, I’m sure that you already have in mind some of your business-cases, that are happy to help prove out using Galigeo For Design Studio mapping functionalities.
If you prefer making your own opinion by trying it yourself, the product is free to test, so why not give it a go.

Please feel free to leave a comment or idea regarding all of this, and/or drop me private message right here on the SCN.

Cheers.

Vincent
My LinkedIn
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