Icon Map

Support

The number of requests from people asking for help has become unsustainable, and I am therefore unable to continue offering free support for Icon Map. You can still raise issues on the Github page, but you will need to rely on the Icon Map community to respond.

Commercial Support

FAQs

1. My organisation does now allow uncertified custom visuals

   When you publish your report to the Power BI Service you may see this message in place of the Icon Map visual

   

   This means that uncertified custom visuals have been disabled inn your organisation. Unfortunately it is not possible for Icon Map to become certified. There is further information why below. However, it is possible to create exceptions for specific custom visuals, which are then able to be deployed across the organisation. There is further information on Microsoft's support pages.

2. Can Icon Map be a certified visual?

   Unfortunately, Icon Map cannot be certified by Microsoft as one of the criteria for a certified visual is that a visual doesn’t access any external services.

   Accessing external services or resources. For example, no HTTP/S or WebSocket requests can go out of Power BI to any services.

   See more information on the criteria described in the Microsoft documentation.

   As Icon Map accesses the following external resources, it doesn’t meet these criteria. The following external resources can be accessed by Icon Map:

   • Map background tiles.

     Map background tiles (images containing the map itself) are shown as you move around the map and zoom in or out. These are requested based on the location of the area you are viewing and specific data points or longitude and latitude coordinates are not sent to the mapping provider. It possible to specify your own mapping provider or server.

   • Map overlay tiles.

     Similar to background tiles, overlay tiles are images with a transparent background that are shown overlayed on top of the map background tiles. Icon Map supports a number of pre-defined layers, or you can specify your own provider or server. Again these are requested based on the location of the area you are viewing and specific data points or longitude and latitude coordinates are not sent to the mapping provider.

   • WMS Layers

     Whilst a different protocol, WMS layers provide a similar capability to the map overlay tiles. Icon Map provides no pre-configured options so you must specify your own server or provider. Requests are based on the location of the area you are viewing and specific data points or longitude and latitude coordinates are not sent to the mapping provider.

   • Vector Tile Layers

     Vector tile layers work in the same way as the overlay tiles. The only difference is the format – these tiles are sent in Protobuf format and are formatted by Icon Map once retrieved. They are requested based on the location of the area you are viewing and specific data points or longitude and latitude coordinates are not sent to the mapping provider.

   • GeoJSON Layers

     These layers are read in their entirety from the URL specified by the report author. The URL specified will be called. No additional parameters are added by the map, so unless specifically configured by the report author using DAX based expressions, no data is sent from the data model.

   • Images

     Icon map has the ability to place images on the map based on a URL. URLs are specified using DAX based expressions by the report author. No additional information from the data model is sent via Icon Map.

   Geocoding

   Unlike some other map visuals for Power BI, Icon Map has no ability to geocode your data – eg take a place name or address and convert it to a longitude and latitude to determine where to place it on the map. Therefore, no information from the data model is sent to external services for this purposes. All data to display on the map must already have appropriate coordinates specified.

   Requests for the map resources above are made directly from the visual to the map providers’ servers. Icon Map runs within the report viewers web browser, so all requests come from the user’s web browser, not via the Power BI service.

   Licences

   Icon Map is a provided with a MIT licence. It makes use of a number of open source libraries detailed here: https://icon-map.com/licences.html

3. Why do some of my WKT shapes not appear?

   If you have some WKT shapes that are not displaying on the map, but others do, in most cases this is due to invalid WKT caused by the text being truncated. The maximum length of a text value that the Power Query engine can load into a single cell in a table in a dataset is 32766 characters. If you attempt to load more than that, it won't error, but will be truncated.

   There are a number of approaches that we can take to work around this:

   1. Reduce the complexity of the WKT shapes by reducing the number of points. Tools like QGIS or MapShaper allow you to reduce the complexity of your shapes. Fewer points will mean shorter text which will more likely fit in a Power BI cell.
   2. Reduce the precision of the longitude and latitudes in your shapes. Some tools will export shapes with longitude and latitudes to 10 decimal places. This is often more precision than required for your map in Power BI. If you can reduce the number of decimal places, this can have a large impact across the whole of your polygons.
   3. Split your shapes into multiple columns or multiple rows when loading them with Power Query, and then combine them using a DAX measure. There are a number of blog posts and videos with different strategies for this. For example Chris Webb's Blog. This relates to images, but the principal is the same for WKT.

4. My map isn't appearing as I expect - how to debug

   If your map isn't appearing as you expect, for example GeoJSON objects aren't interactive, shapes are the wrong color, or not appearing at all, then there is a process to follow to help work out what might be happening.

   Icon Map attempts to work out what type of object should be appearing based on the configuration of the data provided to it. Sometimes this data isn't provided to the map as you expect, but it's hard to tell, that this is the issue, especially if it's the result of a DAX expression. When I receive a support request, the first thing I will do is make a copy of the map visual and switch the copy to be a table visual. This allows me to see the configuration of the data that's being passed from the field wells. However, this won't include any information that's being passed through the formatting settings, such as WKT object and colors so I also add these to the table.

   

   If your WKT shapes are not appearing then it may be worth adding a DAX measure so check that the length is not beyond the maximum 32766 characters. For example: WKT Width = LEN (MAX ('Table'[WKT Column]'))