Shapefiles are made available with many popular GIS solutions. There is a lot of data made available on the web, most commonly from organizations like CDC, or local governments. In many cases, boundary files are freely available on the internet. If your organization currently uses a GIS solution like ESRI or MapInfo, you can consult with your GIS solution expert. If there are specific shapefiles that your organization requires for development, please contact support.

When obtaining your Shapefiles, you will typically get a minimum of 3 files:

• SHP- The SHP file contains the data required to plot data points that make up the shapes. The .SHP file is linked directly to GMaps Plugin, where it is rendered as a layer.
• DBF- Database file table contains all of the meta data that describes each individual shape in the .SHP file. The DBF is extremely important because the SHP file does not contain any meta data required for labels in your map.
• SHX– Index file used to combine SHP and DBF file for GIS solutions. This file is required to maintain the integrity of the files when used with GIS solutions. GMaps Plugin does NOT utilize the SHX, but it is important to keep all 3 files together in case if you need to edit the shape data within a GIS solution.
  Learn more about Shapefiles from the ESRI Shapefile Specification

Shapefile Requirements for use with CMaps Analytics

• CMaps Analytics only supports the Polygon, Polygon-Z and Polyline shape types.
• Shapefile projection should be WGS 84
• Shapefile sizing should be less than 2MB for the best dashboard or application performance

At Centigon Solutions, we have prepared common geo-data and collected resources for you to locate and download geo data in Shapefile format.
Get Shapefiles for use with CMaps Analytics with our Shapefile Explorer

Where to Find Shapefiles?
While there are free resources on the web for Shapefiles, we have pulled together the basic resources you need to rapidly access, connect, and progress forward on your analytics project.

View Shapefile Explorer

Many Business Intelligence professionals want to create custom regions / territories but lack the tools and resources to do so. If your regions are based on common administrative areas like county, state, or country, we have build CMaps Analytics Region Generator. This is a plugin for Quantum GIS that helps automate this process into a few clicks, merging administrative areas into your named regions.

Want to learn how to manually manipulate region data? This tutorial will explain how to use QuantumGIS to merge, delete, simplify, or re-project shapes to work well with GMaps Plugin.

If you use Shapefile Explorer, you can use common administrative area shape data directly from our Amazon CDN (content delivery network), which ensures fast performance, uptime, and scalability from CMaps Analytics cloud.
To visualize one or multiple shapefiles into your dashboard, you will first need to upload your shapefiles onto any web/application server. This needs to be a web application server that is accessible via HTTP. Ultimately, you need to be able to access the shapefile as a URL (http://yourwebserver/yourfile.shp). If you are publishing your dashboard (SWF) to a web server, shapefiles are only accessible via HTTP and will not work if the shapefile is on your local computer or file share.

Product Specific Instructions:

CMaps Plugin (formerly GMaps Plugin) for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
CMaps Analytics Designer (supports extensions like custom HTML5, Webi, and other HTML5 extensions)

Define Shapefile and Data Order Keys

A Shapefile has a very specific data index/order that will NOT match your business data queries. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that your business data or query will contain all of the locations inside of a Shapefile. Built into CMaps Plugin and GMaps Plugin is a simple Data to Shape Linking & Visibility feature that simplifies this connection. You will first bind Shape File Order Keys which is a definition of all shapes inside of your shapefile. Then you will link corresponding column of data with your business data with corresponding keys.
Learn how to extract Shapefile order keys from a DBF file
Learn how to use Data Keys with CMaps Plugin for SAP Dashboards