Configuring the appearance of your data on the map

Configure the icons, colors, and shapes that are used in map markers to represent the data items from your data source.

Before you begin

A data item can be represented by either an icon at a point on the map, or multiple icons at points on a map. Alternatively, a data item can be represented by one of a range of other geometrical formats: a line, multiple lines, a shape, or multiple shapes. On the Minimal Properties tab, specify the geometric format of the marker to represent your data on the map. On the Minimal Properties tab, you can also specify a lookup location for shape data values.

If your data source acquires data from an Esri server, the styling metadata that is defined at the ArcGIS feature service URL is used to display data items on the map. The styling metadata settings override any settings that you define on the Appearance tab, except for the line thickness and color opacity settings for lines and polygons.

About this task

You can configure the default style for the data source on the Styles tab. You can also define styles and assign these styles to expressions to change the appearance of map markers according to the value of minimal and key properties in your data source.

The way that styles are applied to data items depends on the format of the data items:
Point data items
You can select an icon on the Icons tab to use as the marker. Only the fill color setting is relevant to data items that are represented by icons. If you want to upload your own icon into the solution, the icon must be in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format, and you must upload a dark and light version of the icon. In the Operations view, the light version of the icon is displayed when the fill color, or paddle color, is a dark color, and the dark version is displayed when the color of the paddle is a light color. For more information about designing data item icons, see the related link.
Shape data items
Instead of an icon, you can assign a shape. For line and multi-line format data items, the fill color setting and the color opacity setting are not relevant.

Procedure

  1. To access the data sources configuration tool, in the navigation menu, click Administration > Configuration Tools > Data Sources.
  2. On the Appearance tab, click either Icons or Styles, depending on whether you want to assign an icon or a style to the map marker that represents your data.
    Icons
    To assign an icon as a map marker, select the icon of your choice in the Available icons field, or upload your own icons by clicking Upload Dark Icon and Upload Light Icon. You must upload both dark and light versions of your icon so that the icon can be seen throughout the solution interface. To assign a default paddle color for the icon, select that color from the Fill color list in the Style for data source section on the Styles tab.
    Note: If you want to use an icon, for Radius and Sides enter the value 0.

    Instead of an icon, you can assign a shape to a marker that is in point format. If you enter nonzero values for Radius and Sides, data items are represented by a shape instead of an icon.

    Styles

    • To assign a default style for the entire data source, select values in the Style for data source fields. Select values for line color, and, optionally, fill color, depending on the geometrical format that you chose on the Minimal Properties tab. You can also configure line thickness and color opacity. Only the fill color setting is relevant to data items that are represented by icons.

    • You can also add styles based on one or more properties in your data source. Similar to the default style settings, you can set values for line color, fill color, line thickness, and color opacity. Alternatively, you can select an icon as the map marker, and select a fill color as the icon's paddle color. For each property style that you add, you can assign the style to an expression to determine how to render a data item whose property value satisfies the expression. If a data item satisfies the criteria for more than one expression, only the style expression with the highest numerical ranking is applied to the data item. For example, if a data item matches the style expressions that have a ranking of 0 and 2, only the style expression with a ranking of 2 is applied.

  3. Optional: Assign a style based on one or more properties in your data source:
    1. On the Styles tab, click Add a style.
    2. Enter a name.
    3. Select the required style settings.
    4. To create an expression to control where the property style is used, click the Assign style to an expression tab. The order in which styles are displayed depends on the ranking order value, where the value 0 corresponds to items that are displayed at the top.
    5. Select Basic or Advanced from the Add Style Expression list to choose how to define the expression.
      Basic
      Specify values for the Property, Operation, and Criteria fields to create an expression to determine the data items that are rendered in the selected style.
      Advanced
      Enter an SQL select statement to determine the data items that are rendered in the selected style.
      • In the SQL statement, select all values from the data source table for each entry that matches the specified condition. Specify the data source table by adding IOC.TARGET_TABLE_ as a prefix to the name of the data source.
      • For example, if a data source named TEST includes a STARTDATE property, enter the following SQL statement to render the TEST data items with a start date after July 1, 2017 in the selected style:
        SELECT * FROM IOC.TARGET_TABLE_TEST WHERE STARTDATE > '2017-07-01'
  4. Optional: On the Display tab, specify which properties are displayed in the user interface components. You can configure the order in which properties are displayed within their sections in the user interface components.
    • For IBM® Intelligent Operations Center data sources, the user interface components include the hover card, preview card, New Item window, Update window, Full Properties window, calendar, and list. If you want one or more properties to be displayed when you hover over an individual data item, select minimal or key properties to display in the hover card. You can configure either minimal or key properties to be displayed on the preview card for individual data items. You can select the minimal and key properties only if they are configured as visible in the user interface.
      Note: Regardless of what you specify here, in the Operations view, all minimal and key properties are always displayed in the New Item window and in the Update window.
  5. In the data sources tool, move to another tab, or click OK, to save your data source for use in the system. Click Save to apply the updates to an existing data source.