Christmas time is coming near and I’m in a festive mood, so today I have a short post to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Of course, it wouldn’t be a QlikFix Christmas if I hadn’t whipped up a little visual effect in QlikView. Without further ado, here is my QlikView Christmas card to you:
But wait, there’s more! Inspired by the Christmas theme over at Matt Fryer’s QlikView Addict blog (a recommended read, by the way), I decided to create a small document extension that lets you add a little Christmas spirit to your own QlikView documents. Amaze (or annoy) your clients, co-workers and users! For example, how about adding a little snow to the golf course? read more »
After many months of hard work, today I am proud and excited to announce the upcoming release of the new QlikView book that Mike García and I wrote together:
QlikView 11 for Developers
With 500 pages of original content and an extensive collection of code samples, we believe this book contains everything new (and seasoned) QlikView developers should know in order to put QlikView 11 to productive use.
The book will be published by Packt Publishing and is scheduled for release on November 15th. If you want to secure a copy for yourself, pre-orders can be placed via this page.
Of course, writing a book is not a solo (or in our case, duo) exercise. Mike and I could not have done it without the great contributions of:
In the coming weeks, we will be giving you insights into the book and will also be giving away a few copies, so be sure to watch this space. You can get notified of new posts by entering your email address in the input box in the top right corner of this page.
Update 2012/11/20: yesterday we were informed by the publisher that both the print version and the e-book will be released on November 23rd.
Update 2012/11/29: for those that are unable to download the code bundle from the publisher’s website, you can also download it from this link: http://bit.ly/CodeBundle
A fun little easter egg that shows the boys and girls at QlikView R&D have a sense of humor. Entering the expression:
=’qmem://<bundled>/Images/clippy.png’
into a text object and choosing the Image representation shows our old *ahem* friend Clippy. Or should I say Qlikky?
Besides Clippy, there are actually a lot more images embedded in QlikView than just those listed under <bundled>/BuiltIn. Almost all of the images in the QlikView user interface (and lots more) can be referenced via the hidden folder <bundled>/Images. In the application that you can download below, you will find an overview of all hidden embedded images.
In operationally focused QlikView projects, I’m often asked is if it’s possible to search for a list of values in a list box by copy-and-pasting from an external source. For example, searching for customer ID’s by pasting values from an Excel spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, out of the box, QlikView does not support this method of searching for multiple values. However, by combining an input box, a variable and a trigger, we can approximate this functionality quite nicely.
Time to dust off a posting category that hasn’t been getting as much love as it should have; the QlikView blog round-up. Today I have for you three blog posts that I read recently and found very interesting:
Today I will show you how to store variables and their definitions in an external file… and why you would want to do that.
To start with the last part, in my opinion it is important to apply calculations and business rules consistently across QlikView applications. Doing this manually takes a lot of time and is prone to errors. Besides that, it is just not a very fun task. Fortunately, a lot of this can be handled by setting up a multi tiered environment with one or more QVD layers (for more information on this, see Rob Wunderlich’s excellent “Understanding & Best Practices with QVD files” webinar and slides).
Sometimes however, you need to use calculations that cannot be (easily) pushed to a QVD layer, for example when calculating averages or using set analysis. How can you store those calculations in a central place so they can be reused?
After my previous post about variables, I got an interesting question from DV. He asked me about the reuse of chart expressions by referencing the label of another expression (“label referencing”), and what the performance implications of using variables and label referencing versus direct expressions are.
I use variables and label referencing extensively in my applications, but I never really tested what this means for performance. I have always assumed that using variables instead of direct expressions would have a slight impact on performance. I also suspected that using label referencing would result in significantly better performance (I will explain this later).
But was this really true? Triggered by DV’s question, I set up a small experiment to test my assumptions.
It has been a while since my last post. To get back in the habit of regular updates, I am starting today with a short tip on a caveat of the use of the equals sign (=).
Starting an expression with or without an equals sign may almost seem like an arbitrary decision. Most developers quickly figure out that this is not true for text objects. However, there is another, less obvious area where the use of the equals sign can greatly impact how (and more importantly, when) your expression is calculated.
"This has been a fantastic experience and the learning opportunities were enormous. Of all the training and conferences I attended for QlikView this has been above and beyond the best one to date."
- San Francisco Summit attendee
"When you finish the developer course you think you know it all, but when you come to this Summit you realize that you know nothing. It was much more than I expected."
- London Summit attendee
"“Great presentations, very energizing and inspiring. Lots of tips and tricks, ideas and experience exchange."