MapThat – Data Catalogue Tool

by David Crowther

MapThat v6.2.0 onwards now provides a new Data Catalogue tool, so if your GIS team hasn’t already created a mapping layer for your data you can access those tables yourself directly from the GeoStore!

The new MapThat Data Catalogue Tool is available from the Show Layers panel.

Once you press the Data Catalogue Tool (plus button)…

… an Add Data popup appears listing all of the Tables in your GeoStore Database.

Simply tick the button to the left of the table you wish to load….

And on the right choose the style you wish to apply to the layer. For example, here we have chosen a green fill for the Parks & Green Spaces Layer.

Having selected the Table and the Style to use, press the Add button.

The Table is then added into MapThat into a new Tree called Added Data at the top of the Show Layers panel.

The added Table then acts like any other MapThat layer, where you can tick to display the map features. Here we have ticked on the Parks and Green Spaces and using their chosen style they appear as green polygons in the map window.

You can add as many Tables from your GeoStore as you wish to, simply choose the Add Data tool, and keep making a selection – here we are adding the Open Spaces table, using a red polygon style.

Each table that is added, will be listed in the Added Data Tree, and can be ticked on/off as needed.

You can also add tables that are Point data, as long as the source table has a geometry field. For example, here we have chosen the Liverpool Schools table, and on the right we can choose a PIN ICON to represent the School locations.

Again, once added, the Table is listed in the Added Tree and can be ticked on/off as needed.

Any table added via the Data Catalogue tool will act in the same way as any other MapThat layer.

E.g. you can click on a map feature and a default bubble will list the attributes for each feature.

These layers will also show in the Data Table, so you can view all records,.. as well as hover over and highlight individual map features.

In the Data Table you can also use the FILTER tools to filter your added data.

And these layers also allow you to change their opacity with the opacity slider!

This new tool came as a suggestion from one of our customers, because they knew it would help their users. We are proud of this enhancement and hope it enables current and future users to view as many datasets as possible… without having to rely on their GIS team to create layers in the backend!