ESRI web maps in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 – now available on GitHub

[#1]

It’s not often that you can add features to a released product.  But SAS Visual Analytics 8.2’s “Data-Driven Content” allows VA to be used in new ways.

One feature SAS has been investigating is the ability to use web maps.  ESRI’s web maps enable users to combine a base map with any of ESRI’s layers—showing information ranging from demographics to traffic to weather patterns—and to bundle that combination into a single, publishable unit.

As part of our investigation, SAS is making available an open-source, data-driven content provider for ESRI web maps in VA 8.2 reports.

Users can get their own copy of the provider, host it locally, and assign the “content” property of their data-driven controls to the provider’s URL.  By adding arguments to the URL (such as “visualizationType” and “use3D”), they can introduce data from VA reports as new, native layers inside an ESRI web map.

The layers currently supported include scatter plots, bubble charts, and choropleths.

Following is a 3D web map to which SAS VA has added a layer showing NOAA measurements of Atlantic hurricanes in 2000 sized by wind speed and colored by air pressure.

VA users (8.2 and later) can get further information from the project’s documentation, and the source itself is available from the sassoftware github as sas-visualanalytics-geowebmap.

Download the Files (GitHub)

Additional resources on data-driven content

• Community article: Data-Driven Content: leveraging third-party visualizations in SAS Visual Analytics (part 1 of 2) by SAS' Renato Luppi.
• Community article: Leverage a Google 3D-PieChart within VA using the Data-Driven Content Object by SAS’ Meera Venkataramani
• SAS Global Forum paper: Create Awesomeness: Use Custom Visualization to Extend SAS Visual Analytics to Get the Results You N... by SAS’ Robby Powell and Renato Luppi
• Foundational GitHub contribution by SAS’ Drew Anderson

As SAS continues to investigate ESRI’s growing feature set, we would be grateful for your feedback, and, of course, we welcome collaboration on GitHub.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @tograh, @PeterKleuver,

I have a customer that requires NL maps, but according to this ESRI user, it does not seem possible. Any ideas?

https://community.esri.com/thread/216872-use-arcgis-data-in-sas-viya-based-on-nl-esri-server

Thank you in advance,

Kind regards,

Juan

[tograh]

A VA installation can be configured to use non-default Esri services.  See the localEsriServicesUrl setting.   From that esri.com post, it sounded like this may be what they needed.

The "geowebmap" data-driven content control will default to look for a base webmap by portalItemId at the portal arcgis.com.  The portal can be manually adjusted in the code itself.  We could also add the option to the API.  If a change to the data-driven control is what is being requested here, we’ll add that request to the public issues list on github.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @tograh,

many thanks for your quick answer.

I think it would be nice to have a possibility (documented) to adjust that data-driven control component to other ESRI regional map providers. The US one is very nice per-se, but I am finding that some customers do require the additional information provided by the regional ESRI providers.

[tograh]

The issue "Add API to select non-default portal" has been added and can be tracked here.  Thank you for that apt suggestion.