Elixir Repertoire Map Designer provides a graphical framework that adds a new dimension to data visualisation. Maps can be created that represent geographic areas, such as countries or regions, shops within a shopping mall or even the different departments in your office. The areas of the map are sensitive to mouse clicks, so you can use them to navigate through or filter relevant data. The areas can also be connected to data values, highlighting which sales regions performed best last quarter or which shops have the highest footfall.

Once a map has been designed, it is available in the Elixir Repository as a reusable component. This helps you ensure a consistent style and reduces maintenance across all of the analysis services that you deploy.

Before you can start creating maps, you need map data for the location you want to see. This data consists of two files, a shapefile (.shp) and a database file (.dbf). The pair of files should have the same name, for example Singapore.shp and Singapore.dbf. The shapefile format was defined by ESRI.

The shapefile holds both the shapes and coordinates of the map, whereas the database file holds the meaning of those shapes and points. Both are essential for rendering the map. As the file format for shapefiles has been published, and is a de-facto standard, you can create your own shapefiles if you can't find one that exactly matches your requirements.