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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
QlikView has been around since 1993, but has only really taken off in recent years as a leader in the in-memory BI space and, more recently, in the data discovery area. QlikView features the ability to consolidate relevant data from multiple sources into a single application, as well as an associative data model to allow you to explore the data to a way your brain works, state-of-the-art visualizations, dashboard, analysis and reports, and mobile data access.
QlikView for Developers Cookbook builds on your initial training and experiences with QlikView to help you become a better developer. This book features plenty of hands-on examples of many challenging functions.
Assuming a basic understanding of QlikView development, this book provides a range of step-by-step exercises to teach you different subjects to help build your QlikView developer expertise.
From advanced charting and layout to set analysis; from advanced aggregations through to scripting, performance, and security, this book will cover all the areas that you need to know about.
The recipes in this book will give you a lot of the information that you need to become an excellent QlikView developer.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 252
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
QlikView for Developers Cookbook
QlikView for Developers Cookbook
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: June 2013
Production Reference: 1170613
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78217-973-3
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Stephen Redmond (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Stephen Redmond
Reviewers
Steve Dark
Ralf Becher
Miguel Ángel García
Barry Harmsen
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer
Lead Technical Editors
Rukmini Iyer
Neeshma Ramakrishnan
Technical Editors
Jalasha D'costa
Saumya Kunder
Lubna Shaikh
Amit Ramadas
Project Coordinator
Apeksha Chitnis
Proofreader
Amy Guest
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Production Coordinator
Manu Joseph
Cover Work
Manu Joseph
Foreword
"If you can't explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough."
This quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, very nicely sums up my thoughts on how to best test and improve your (QlikView) skills and knowledge. Starting out as a hands-on practitioner, this lead to me teaching QlikView and writing a blog about it, and culminated in 2012 when Miguel García and I wrote the book QlikView 11 for Developers.
When we finished writing the first draft of the book back in June 2012, our editor asked us to recommend people for technical review. Stephen Redmond was one of the first persons to come to my mind. Anyone who has read his blog or interacted with him can see that he knows QlikView. More importantly though, as I know from experience, he also has no problem voicing a strong opinion. Since we intended for QlikView 11 for Developers to compete on quality and depth of subject, Stephen was an ideal technical reviewer to challenge us. Along with that of the other technical reviewers, Stephen's expert feedback helped ensure that our book achieved the quality and depth that we strived for.
After being published in November 2012, QlikView 11 for Developers quickly became the best rated and best-selling book on QlikView, and has continued to do very well. It has helped novices take their first steps in QlikView, as well as help more experienced developers prepare for their certifications.
Given the success of QlikView 11 for Developers, you can imagine that I was initially skeptical when I learned that our publisher wanted to release another book about QlikView. Why would you need another book?
I was reassured, however, when I learned that Stephen would be taking on the job. Not only because his involvement in our book would ensure minimal overlap between the two titles, but also because I was (and am) confident that he would deliver quality material that appeals to anyone who is looking to further enhance his or her QlikView skills and knowledge. The man who brought us the "Redmond Debt Profile Chart" was bound to have many more interesting and innovative recipes up his sleeve.
As a technical reviewer for this book, I got a first-hand look at the materials Stephen was producing and I can tell you that this is quite a different book that will be a valuable addition to your library. Stephen's cookbook allows for casual, bite-sized reads by offering self-contained recipes. It is as if you've just discovered a completely new QlikView blog with dozens of tips and tricks. The recipes will take you from simple-but-effective tricks to sophisticated solutions. Even I have found a few recipes that I cannot wait to serve my clients. Best of all, they are all explained in a simple, straightforward manner, demonstrating that Stephen absolutely understands QlikView very well.
Barry Harmsen
Independent Business Intelligence Consultant, Co-author of QlikView 11 for Developers, and blogger at www.qlikfix.com.
About the Author
Stephen Redmond is CTO of CapricornVentis Limited (http://www.capventis.com), a QlikView Elite Partner. He is the author of several books, including the very popular DevLogix series for SalesLogix developers.
In 2006, after working for many years with CRM systems, reporting and analysis solutions, and data integration, Stephen started working with QlikView. Since then, CapricornVentis have become QlikView's top partner in the UK and the Ireland territory and, with Stephen at the head of the team, have implemented QlikView in a wide variety of enterprises and large business customers across a wide range of sectors from public sector to financial services to large retailers.
Stephen regularly contributes to online forums, including the Qlik Community. His QlikView blog is at http://qliktips.blogspot.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@stephencredmond), where he tweets about QlikView, BI, data visualization, and technology in general.
I would like to thank my family for their ongoing support. None of what I do would be possible with them.
A big shout out to my colleagues at CapricornVentis, who are a great team to work with.
A special thanks to all of the customers that I have worked with implementing QlikView. It is your business issues that have inspired me to create the solutions that occupy these pages.
About the Reviewers
For 10 years, Steve Dark was a SQL Server / MS ASP developer building web based reporting solutions, until he was shown a demo of QlikView. Soon after this revelation, Steve left his previous employer to set up Quick Intelligence – a consultancy focusing entirely on QlikView and delivering business intelligence solutions. Preferring to stay at the coal face, Steve spends the majority of his time with clients building QlikView applications, managing QlikView deployments, and running projects.
He will never tire of showing QlikView to new users and seeing that "jaw drop moment".
Steve is active on QlikCommunity and other social media sites sharing his enthusiasm for QlikView and assisting other users. Through his blog, he shares tutorials, examples, and insights about QlikView (read it at http://www.quickintelligence.co.uk/).
Steve was also the technical reviewer of QlikView 11 For Developers by Barry Harmsen and Miguel García, Packt Publishing.
I would like to thank Stephen for putting this book together, and for his excellent QlikTips blog.
Ralf Becher has worked as an IT system architect and as an IT consultant since 1989, in the areas of banking, insurance, logistics, automotive, and retail. He founded TIQ Solutions in 2004 with his partners.
The Leipzig company specializes in modern, quality-assured data management; since 2004, it has been helping its customers process, evaluate, and maintain the quality of company data, helping them introduce, implement, and improve complex solutions in the fields of data architecture, data integration, data migration, master data management, metadata management, data warehousing, and business intelligence.
Ralf is an internationally recognized QlikView expert with a strong position in the QlikCommunity. He started working with QlikView in 2006 and has contributed QlikView add-on solutions for data quality and data integration, especially for connectivity in the Java and Big Data realm. He runs his QlikView data integration blog at http://tiqview.tumblr.com/.
Miguel Ángel García is a Business Intelligence Consultant and QlikView Solutions Architect from Monterrey, Mexico. Having worked throughout many successful QlikView implementations, from its inception through implementation, and performed across a wide variety of roles on each project, his experience and skills range from applications development and design, to presales, technical architecture, system administration, as well as functional analysis and overall project execution.
He currently holds the QlikView Designer, QlikView Developer, and QlikView System Administrator Certifications.
He is the co-author of the QlikView 11 for Developers book, published in November 2012 by Packt Publishing.
Barry Harmsen is an independent Business Intelligence Consultant based in the Netherlands. Originally from a background of traditional business intelligence, data warehousing, and performance management, in 2008, he made the shift to QlikView and a more user-centric form of business intelligence.
Since switching over to QlikView, Barry has completed many successful implementations in many different industries, from financial services to telecoms, and from manufacturing to healthcare. Barry's QlikView experience covers a wide variety of roles and subjects; requirements analysis, design, development, architecture, infrastructure, system administration, integration, project management, and training.
In 2012, Barry co-authored the book QlikView 11 for Developers. This book has quickly become the must-have book within the QlikView community. Barry writes a QlikView blog at QlikFix.com and can be followed on Twitter at @meneerharmsen.
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Preface
There is no substitute for experience.
QlikView is a great technology for delivering information and, unusually for a "BI" product, is quite easy to get up and running with simple data sets – they even have a wizard that can get you up and running off an Excel file without having to do any scripting. If you need to bring in more complex data sets, you need to get into the script. Even then, there are some wizards available that will write most of the script for you.
To start your learning process, there are free resources available from http://www.qlikview.com/training. There is a very active community forum on http://community.qlikview.com, where you can ask questions and get answers. There is a really excellent book that teaches you how to develop in QlikView, QlikView 11 for Developers by Barry Harmsen and Mike García (http://www.packtpub.com/qlikview-11-developers/book). Then, if you still need it after all that, you can attend official QlikView classroom training. But, there is no substitute for experience.
At CapricornVentis, we don't just train and leave. We schedule time with the trainees to sit with them, one-on-one, and work on their data, to give them the benefit of our experience, to answer all of those, "How do I do that" questions. We do this because we understand that training isn't enough. It is a great start, but there is no substitute for experience.
And this, I hope, is what this book is—the benefit of my experience.
I have been working with QlikView since 2006. As well as working at the coalface, delivering great solutions, I have also been delivering QlikView training for most of that time. I was one of the first two people in the world (neither of us is sure who was first!) to be certified when QlikView brought out their first developer certification on Version 8. I was one of the earliest certified on designer for Version 8. I have since been recertified on every version up to the latest certifications on Version 11. I have been writing about QlikView on my blog, http://qliktips.blogspot.com, since 2009. I have quite a lot of experience with QlikView. And there is no substitute for experience.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Charts, will look at advanced charting topics such as creating custom pop ups, box charts, bullet charts, and the Redmond chart. We also look at some tips and tricks to create great visualizations.
Chapter 2, Layout, will look at how to modify some of the default layout options and colors, as well as discussing better ways to layout objects.
Chapter 3, Set Analysis, shows some advanced examples of using set analysis in different scenarios.
Chapter 4, Advanced Aggregations, looks at parameters such as TOTAL and functions such as AGGR and the Range functions that allow us to perform vertical calculations.
Chapter 5, Advanced Coding, uses VBScript coding to extract data from QlikView, generate reports, create QlikView objects, and enhance QlikView functionality.
Chapter 6, Data Modeling, covers the area of key tables and link tables, an area that can be confused with new QlikView developers.
Chapter 7, Extensions, introduces the ability to create new visualizations with web technologies and integrate them into QlikView documents.
Chapter 8, Useful Functions, gives you examples of using some of QlikView's very useful functions in different scenarios.
Chapter 9, Script, takes your QlikView scripting a step beyond training. Includes discussion on creating flags, exists and keep, default formats, partial loads, peek and previous, and interval match.
Chapter 10, Improving Performance, shows how to improve the performance of a QlikView data model. Discusses strategies such as reducing data sizes and optimizing expressions. Also, when and when not to denormalize for performance.
Chapter 11, Security, goes through some of the most common issues around section access security in QlikView.
What you need for this book
You need a copy of QlikView Desktop, which you can download for free from http://www.qlikview.com/download. After that, you shouldn't need anything else.
To demonstrate the different techniques and functions, I will usually get you to load a table of data. We do this using the INLINE function. For example:
This will load a table with two fields (Field1 and Field2) and two rows of data.
Most of the time, this type of table is enough for what we need to do. In the few examples, where I need you to use more data than that, we will use publicly available data sources.
Who this book is for
This book is for anyone who has loaded data in QlikView, created a few charts, and then asked the question, "How do I?" If you have either attended QlikView Developer training or have taught yourself QlikView from books or online sources, this book is meant for you. You might be working for a QlikView customer, partner, or even QlikView themselves (or want to) and want to improve your QlikView skills.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We do this using the INLINE function."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Extension Objects menu."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
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Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Errata
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Charts
In this chapter, we will cover:
Introduction
Charts are the most important area of QlikView because they are the main method of information delivery, and QlikView is all about information delivery.
There are a few terms that I want to just define before we get cracking, just to make sure you know what I am talking about.
The basis of every chart is some kind of calculation—you add up some numbers or you count something. In QlikView, these calculations are calledexpressions. Every chart should have at least one expression. In fact, some charts require more than one expression.
Most of the time,
