Adding a feature layer
Features display areas or objects on a map. The features are usually administrative areas that are placed on the map based on the geographic information provided in your data and they can represent things like zip codes, cities, counties, regions, or countries. When shapefiles or GeoJSON files are opened in Spotfire they are automatically configured so that they can be used as feature layers in map charts. However, there may be times when some manual work is needed before the data can be used in a feature layer.
Procedure
Feature layer example
This map chart visualization shows Sweden, using two data tables: Sweden Counties and Sweden county capitals. The data includes added census information from 2015, and it has a calculated column indicating cities with populations over 200,000. The map chart visualization includes a feature layer with the following properties.
- Title is set to Sweden Counties (Län)
- Appearance is set to semi-transparent (displaying the OpenStreetMap cycling map TMS layer beneath it).
- Data is set to the data table Sweden county capitals - Swedish Counties (Län).
- Geographic location is set to Feature by County (län).
- The Legend check box is cleared.
- Color is set to
the following values.
- Color by: Larger than 200000 (an added calculated column).
- Color scheme: 2 colors.
- Color items: True (over 200,000) and False (under 200,000), with color selections customized to blue and red.
The result is that the counties with cities over 200,000 (Stockholm, Västra Götaland, and Skåne) are the first color, while all other counties are the second color.

Requirements and settings for feature data in Spotfire
This bullet list is a summary of what is needed to view interactive shapes in Spotfire. See also Configuring WKB data for use with maps.
- The binary geometry data must be extracted to one Geometry column and six coordinate columns. The columns also need to be assigned the proper value on the MapChart.ColumnTypeId column property: Geometry, XMin, XMax, YMin, YMax, XCenter and YCenter.
- The ContentType column property must be set to application/x-wkb for the Geometry column.
- The data type of the geometry column should be "Binary" or "BLOB".
- The data types for the coordinate columns should be "Real".
- The renderer for the
geometry column should be set to
Geometry in the Visualization Properties of the selected
visualization (available in the installed client only). For example, in the
Columns tab of a Table visualization.
You can also show geometries as shapes in some labels and tooltips, and might also need to specify the Geometry renderer there.