Hi John

Yellowfin does support the use of polygons for heat maps.

You have to select the Rastor Map as your Chart Type and not the GIS Maps.

This wiki page should help you to achieve what you trying to do.

Regards,
Stephen

Stephen - thank you for responding and I appreciate your help!


Ouch. That answer is what I was afraid of.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume that this means that YellowFin users (administrators) will have to:

1. Locate or create an appropriately color-coded zip code .png or similar raster-based file (as well as the color-to-reference-code mapping).

2. Ensure its accuracy (has a new town been incorporated and allocated a new zip code? Have some zip code boundaries slightly changed in the past few months? Who knows??)

3. Manage the versioning of such files.

4. Go through the steps of pointing YellowFin to the correct files and setting them up.

My guess would be that this process might take 1-8 hours for a YellowFin neophyte, depending on how successful one's search for a good zip code map and corresponding color-to-code file is.

There are other BI tools that manage this process for their users, and my company is evaluating some of them also. It is very disappointing that the creation/acquisition, management and maintenance of such functionality is being pushed onto YellowFin users/administrators.

Does anyone know if there plans to build "automagic" zip code heatmap functionality into YellowFin?

Hi John

Yes you are correct.
The onus is on the Yellowfin user/administrator to locate, create, manage and set up this sort of Map.

I will request and enhancement task for this to be considered for future releases.
However we are in the process of finalizing the build for next months major release, so unfortunately this will not be done in the near future.

Regards,
Stephen

Stephen - thank you for your quick response.

Hi John/Stephen,

We have been throwing ideas here around the office but cannot understand how an application can look at an image and then automatically figure out what boundary equals what post code. Do these other tools use an actual flat image, or are you using a google map or wms server?

We are happy to raise an enhancement, though we just don't see how an application can look at a flat image file and understand it's a map and identify locations.

What other tools have you found that can do this?
Do you like upload a JPEG etc, and it does the rest?

Very intrigued.

Thanks,
David

Hi David,

This was the state-of-the-art as far as I understood it in 2013 (but maybe a update has changed things?):

"Boundaries" are not stored or used by YF. Different regions are identified by their colors. For instance, color 0xFFCA01 might represent zip code 10027 or Germany or a particular bone of the body.

So every region will need to have its own particular color in the png.

Maybe the YF guys can shed some light on how things are done now (or post the appropriate link, because searching for "YellowFin BI heatmap" brings me to this page...)

Hi,

Ahh, actually using an image and working our boundaries based on color is also what we do with 'Image Maps'.

However we have changed mapping in Yellowfin 7.1 and now allow people to download 'Geo Packs' so you won't need to worry about providing your own Geodata (for most major regions).

A beta release of 7.1 is available from our support site, but you are required to sign-in to get access.
If you do not have a login account, you will need to contact your YF account manager to request a login .

Please let me know if you have any questions on this.

Regards,
David