Never think you know it all! Today I have for you a little ‘gotcha!’ about the LOAD DISTINCT statement that I picked up from Oleg Troyansky at the Masters Summit for QlikView.
Common knowledge about LOAD DISTINCT is that it will remove duplicate records from the input table, similar to how the DISTINCT clause works in SQL. For example:
However, when used in combination with the JOIN or CONCATENATE statement, the results can be surprising, and even counterintuitive.
Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, one of my favorite TV shows was the A-Team. Over-the-top, cartoonish action with huge explosions, cars flipping over in mid-air topped off with a cool theme song. And all without anyone getting seriously hurt. This was the perfect TV show for young Barry!
But I’ve grown up since, and my tastes have matured (somewhat). However, there is one thing about the A-Team which I think is still relevant today: the actual A-Team and the well-balanced blend of skills of its members. No matter what an episode’s villain (drug king-pin/shady land developer/corrupt senator/whatever) threw at them, the combined qualities of the A-Team always ensured that they came out on top.
In today’s post, I am going to take a closer look at the skills and qualities of the A-Team, and will explain how they can be translated to the role of a QlikView Consultant. (Or, alternatively, how these roles can be used to staff the perfect QlikView Competency Center.)
After many months of hard work, today I am proud and excited to announce the upcoming release of the new QlikView book that Mike GarcĂa and I wrote together:
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:
| Donald Farmer | Foreword | Blog | @donalddotfarmer |
| Ralf Becher | Technical review | Blog | @TIQView |
| Steve Dark | Technical review | Blog | @quintelligence |
| Stephen Redmond | Technical review | Blog | @stephencredmond |
| John Trigg | Code support | @qt_trigjoh | |
| Rashmi Phadnis | Acquisition editor | @rashp | |
| Joanne Fitzpatrick | Acquisition editor | ||
| Sai Gamare | Project coordinator | @saigamare | |
| Anugya Khurana | Project coordinator | ||
| Ankita Shashi | Lead Technical editor | ||
| Nitee Shetty | Technical editor |
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 2012/11/23: the book is now available for sale! (Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Packt)
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
With so many people commenting positively on my previous two pointless-but-pretty visual effects in QlikView, I’ve decided to make it an irregularly recurring Friday-afternoon series. At least, until I run out of ideas or opportunities to build these applications.
This time I’ve created an animated fire effect using a scatter plot. Like the previous two effects it has absolutely no practical application, unless you’re pitching QlikView to Industrial Light & Magic đ The video below demonstrates the effect.
If you want to try the application for yourself, you can download it by clicking the link below. Beware that the application is quite memory-hungry, you’ll need at least 4GB to run the app.
Download the QlikView Animated Fire app
Earlier posts in this series:
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.
As promised in the previous post, today I have a tip for you that is of real, practical use.
Management summary: Ctrl + Shift + S overrules all conditional show expressions making every hidden sheet and sheet object visible.
Full story: Condtional show expressions are used in QlikView to show or hide a sheet or sheet object depending on if a predefined condition has been met. While this is extremely useful functionality to make your applications more user-friendly, it can be a real hassle during development.
If you want to edit a sheet or object when its show condition has not been met, you either have to make a selection that matches the condition, or you have to dig deep into the menu (Settings | Document Properties | Security | Show All Sheets and Objects) to disable, and when you’re done re-enable, conditional display. We all have better things to do with our time, for example reading blog posts that are way longer than they need to be.
Fortunately, in QlikView Desktop (‘classic’ view, not WebView) there is a shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + S overrules all conditional show expressions making every hidden sheet and sheet object visible. Now you know.
We now offer monthly live online training on QlikView 11 extensions:
QlikView Extensions offer nearly unlimited possibility to extend the look, feel, behavior and functionality of QlikView. Unfortunately, most QlikView developers seem to avoid them. While many may simply not need extensions, I often get the impression that a second, more important reason is that most QlikView developers currently miss the required web development skills.
For QlikView developers wanting to bridge the gap between QlikView and extension development, the lack of documentation and scattered examples can make it seem like a daunting task. In reality though, once you find the right resources it is a relatively small step.
The goal of this post is two-fold. First it aims to provide a few key resources that will help you quickly start developing extensions. Secondly, it is meant as a continually updated repository of QlikView extension examples, tutorials, documentation and relevant forum discussions.
Today I read the blog post “Green Is The Colour” by Henric Cronström on QlikTech’s Business Discovery Blog. In this post, Henric points to the fact that, while green may be QlikView’s signature colour, it is the unassociated, gray values that are a crucial part of the discovery process.
While I completely agree with Henric that the colour coding is integral to the QlikView experience, his post did leave me wondering. Does it always have to be green?
A short post today on an ‘annoyance’ that invariably pops up at my clients; when copy and pasting images of QlikView objects into their PowerPoint presentation or Word document, the images look blurry and slightly out of focus.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to solve this. Instead of using the regular paste option, use paste special to paste the image as a bitmap.
In both Office 2007 and 2010, the paste special option can be accessed via the paste drop-down menu on the left of the Home tab/ribbon, or via the Ctrl + Alt + V keyboard shortcut.
That’s it!
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:
Learn Qlik, the Qlik APIs and Web Development at your own pace at Websy Academy
Supercharge your QlikView designs
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