Understanding US County Maps, http://support.sas.com/kb/61/209.html

[DavidPhillips2]

This was moved to the VA Forum:  Posting full text of original post with edits for context:

My goal is to display just county using this setup in VA.  Yes, my data has states and states work seamlessly with VA maps.

I’m trying to understand http://support.sas.com/kb/61/209.html.

I was able to work with the counties on the example interface.  Although the interface has an obvious bug of showing numbers next to the counties.  I’d like to display just the counties.  My data table includes student admission data with just the county name, no numbers.  Where as the sample data has county plus the odd number code.  So when I used my data with the tables from the documentation only Washington showed up.  I’m not sure why Washington showed up.  Oddly when I removed the (number) or the last eight characters of US_counties1, I don’t notice a difference.  Maybe I need to register the updated table in some way or I’m doing the steps in Option two wrong.  My data doesn’t include an ID column.  I’m not sure what that is for in the steps so I stopped at step 4.

1. “Create a new report in the SAS Visual Analytics Designer or a new visualization in SAS Visual Analytics Explorer.
2. If the data has not already been loaded, import the US_COUNTIES1_VALIDATE_STATE table into the SAS® LASR™ Analytic Server.
3. Specify the US_COUNTIES1_VALIDATE_STATE table as the data source for the report or visualization.  
4. Right-click the NAME column.  Select Geography  ► Subdivision (State, Province) Names.  In the Province Names pop-up window, select United States.
5. Add a geo region map to the report canvas and assign NAME to the Geography role.
6. Change the Color role to MEASURE1 or MEASURE2 in order to better view the different U.S. counties.
7. Right-click the ID column.  Select Geography  ► Subdivision (State, Province) SAS Map ID Values.

Change the Geography role on the geo region map to ID. “

[DavidPhillips2]

I’m trying to understand http://support.sas.com/kb/61/209.html.

I was able to work with the counties on the example interface.  Although the interface has an obvious bug of showing numbers next to the counties.  I’d like to display just the counties.  My data table includes student admission data with just the county name, no numbers.  Where as the sample data has county plus the odd number code.  So when I used my data with the tables from the documentation only Washington showed up.  I’m not sure why Washington showed up.  Oddly when I removed the (number) or the last eight characters of US_counties1, I don’t notice a difference.  Maybe I need to register the updated table in some way or I’m doing the steps in Option two wrong.  My data doesn’t include an ID column.  I’m not sure what that is for in the steps so I stopped at step 4.

1. “Create a new report in the SAS Visual Analytics Designer or a new visualization in SAS Visual Analytics Explorer.
2. If the data has not already been loaded, import the US_COUNTIES1_VALIDATE_STATE table into the SAS® LASR™ Analytic Server.
3. Specify the US_COUNTIES1_VALIDATE_STATE table as the data source for the report or visualization.  
4. Right-click the NAME column.  Select Geography  ► Subdivision (State, Province) Names.  In the Province Names pop-up window, select United States.
5. Add a geo region map to the report canvas and assign NAME to the Geography role.
6. Change the Color role to MEASURE1 or MEASURE2 in order to better view the different U.S. counties.
7. Right-click the ID column.  Select Geography  ► Subdivision (State, Province) SAS Map ID Values.

Change the Geography role on the geo region map to ID. “

[ShelleySessoms]

I'll move it to the VA forum for you, @DavidPhillips2.

[FalkoSchulz]

Hi David,

Can you quickly confirm whether you got the sample data to work properly? Note, that replacing some of the lookup tables requires a restart of the web application server as per instructions.

In regards to step #4 - here you are starting to define geographical items. One for US States (state boundaries) and one for US Counties at step #7. Given counties aren't unique via it's name - we typically use the related ID as the lookup value ( US-<StateFIPS><CountyFIPS>). If you don't have the ID column in your data - you will need to join a data source which has related FIPS codes and create such column. 

Hope this helps. Regards, Falko