Hi
I've been working with QlikView for a couple of years now, but I am new to Sense.
I build a few maps this week and it was a quick learning curve. The mapping is much easier and streamlined than in QlikView.
I have a few questions/suggestions.
Multiple Layers on Maps
I think it would be a great if one was able to add more than one measure, but more importantly, add a point layer and an area layer.
One might want to analyse store sales by state with an area layer, but also see the distribution of stores or customers on the same map.
Scripting and kml files
On the back end, I found that it was only possible to upload .kml files. Most of the resources out there are either in .csv or .shp. Finding tools that could properly convert into .kml was a nightmare.
Will it be possible to use .csv or other formats in the future? Even excel? I also found that the kml files are not that portable, i.e. they are big. It would've been nice to extract a kml and write out to .qvd so that one could use that for the polygons.
I also had a problem with a set of about 8000 kml files I wanted to read in, one for each suburb. You cannot merely read in *.kml since each kml's schema name or table name is equal to the filename. Maybe its just me but I couldn't loop through the files using filelist() to change a variable each step of the way, due to the lib: being used. Filelist uses a path, and I couldn't pass the path to the function.
Slippy maps
Some more resources on where slippy maps could be found would be appreciated. Is it possible to integrate with other tile servers?
Performance
Using state level polygons for Australia worked like a dream, just like on the supplied example with USA data. However, when using polygons at suburb level (postcodes) does not work. It freezes up, and crashes Sense. When going into edit mode it takes so long, and when you go back to view mode, nothing happens. It seems like it cannot handle that many points. Do you have a suggestion around this? Even if the data is reduced by a selection (ie selecting one store, suburb, customer etc) the map still wants to render all the polygons. Perhaps if only the affected polygon is shown and rendered, the performance might be better?
I look forward to playing with Sense some more, it really makes certain tasks much easier.
