Styeles and themes in map builder

Question

Where are the styles and themes created using the map builder tool stored?

Answer 1

Hi Richard,
For styles, you can definately create them once (in any schema), and use them from any other schema. For instance if you are connected as user A and you want to apply the style 'star' defined in user B, just use the format 'B.star' to reference it.
Themes and base-maps, however, cannot be shared across schemas at the moment. This is mainly to keep things simple. If we allow cross-schema reference of themes & basemaps, you will soon end up with some confusing scenarios.. For instance, imagine this:
MapViewer is connected to db user A, and we want to display a basemap from user B. The base map contains a theme from user C, and another one from user D. The first theme actually relies on a table owned by user E, while the 2nd theme gets its data from a view ownded by user F... pretty soon we no longer knows what is really being displayed on a map.
So my suggestion is to create styles in any place you want, but create themes (and basemaps) in the user that is connected by MapViewer, in this case, your <schema>_WEB account.  Different applications or departments within an organization often want 'personalized' themes/basemaps for the same tables, so storing themes/basemaps closer to the application (instead of their underlying data) is not a bad idea (i hope).
There is unfortunately a bug in Mapviewer that makes it hard to create a theme for a table from a different schema (yea we tried to 'keep it simpler' - bad idea). Currently, the work around is to manually change the user_sdo_themes entry, so that its 'base table' column looks like 'schema.ROADS', and also add an entry in user_sdo_geom_metadata for 'schema.ROADS'. This will be fixed in the MapViewer soon, and also in Map Builder so that when creating a new theme, you can see all the spatial tables across all the schemas you have 'select' previlege.
thanks
LJ