Map Builder

This post will focus on MapBuilder.

For map views to be used within an OBI Analysis there needs to be some basic backend components set up.

MapBuilder helps with this by creating and managing the Map Metadata.

Download the MapBuilder tool from here - for these blog posts I will be working with the 11.x version.

The one thing I found confusing when I first started working with Map Views was aligning objects in one tool with objects in another tool.  As quick refernce this picture shows objects in MapBuilder that align to OBIEE Map Data Management.

Definition of the objects within MapBuilder:

Theme

● Collection of geometries and includes information for visually representing a layer (default formats, labels)
● The tables defining shapes (geometry columns) are assumed to be in the Oracle DB

Basemap

● Logical collection of themes with associated scale and order
● Mapviewer engine generates tile images based on the basemap definition

Tile Layer

● An instance of basemap presented as image by the Mapviewer engine


When working with MapBuilder the tool is making entries into the following views.

USER_SDO_MAPS – Stores definitions of base maps

USER_SDO_THEMES – stores definitions of individual map layers or themes

USER_SDO_STYLES – stores individual map symbols and other types of styles such as LINE patterns, COLOR definitions and thematic mapping styles

USER_SDO_CACHED_MAPS – Stores maps in Tiles for faster retrieval

Launch the mapbuilder.jar from the downloaded file.  MapBuilder opens to the following view. Click the Connection control to create a connection to the MVDATA schema that was created in the previous post.

Click the Add button

Provide your connection information for the MVDATA Schema

Test the connection

Click Load to connect and return to main screen

Expand Tile Layers and you will see the Oracle Elocation_Map layer we added in our MapViewer post.

We now have MapBuilder configured.  In the next post we will look at loading Shapefiles into our Database as a Geometry table that we will then use to make a Map Theme that we can use in OBIEE as a Map Layer.