Currently, Metabase’s built-in world map visualization only supports alpha-2 codes (eg US
, IL
). The data set we would like to visualize currently stores alpha-3 codes (eg USA
, ISR
) – we use these to interact with a third-party system. However, this means that we cannot visualize this data in Metabase without converting.
The conversion from alpha-3
to alpha-2
is unfortunately not as simple as substr(alpha3, 1, 2)
, as the IL
vs ISR
example for Israel shows. 93/249 countries in the ISO-3166-1 database on my system have this property.
We have a couple of obvious options:
- Create a table of the ISO-3166-1 data and join against it
- Change the data representation to use alpha-2 codes and convert when we need to talk to the third-party API
- Create a custom map that uses alpha-3 codes
We’ll probably do the second, but it would be even better if Metabase transparently understood alpha-3 codes.