Month: December 2017

Qlik Sense On Demand apps

About a year ago, I took a first look at Qlik Sense on demand app generation for a customer. Their problem was not really using big data, but rather that the data the needed for some analysis was simply too big to handle in a Qlik Sense ( or QlikView) app. They had to limit the data to just a shorter time period to make it run at all. Our conclusion at the time was that On Demand App Generation might be the right the right tool, but we had to prioritize other projects and did not complete the project.

Now, about a year later, we have the time to look into it again. And while I think the core concepts and functionality is the same, it has had a facelift, and feels much more like a product ready for production.

Improved user interface

The on demand app generation feature consists of a master or selection app and multiple on-demand apps. The user uses the the selection app, which contains aggregated data, to select a subset of the total data. He then generates an on-demand app, with detailed information about that subset.

The interface for this has been improved a lot. Previously keeping track of your on-demand apps was difficult, now you can find them in the selection app.

All your generated apps are listed in the popup for the selection app, together with information about when they where created and the selections they are based on in the selection app. You can also manage your generated app here, delete it when you are ready with it, reload it with the same selections but new data and open it.

Loading data into the on demand app

In many respects developing on demand apps is just like developing any Qlik Sense app. That’s part of the strength of the feature – you can use your Qlik Sense knowledge for on demand apps too, visualizations are the same, much of the load script will also be the same. What’s new is the connection between the selection app and the on demand app: how do you get the users selections into the ODA, and how should you write the load script.

When we worked with this a year ago, we used Qlik Sense varibles and the script snippets published in Qlik Sense help around using the variables to generate script statements. These snippets helps you generate selection queries in the form of SQL SELECT’s to fetch the data. Our use case is somewhat different: our problem is that we have internally generated data that is simply to big for one app, but the data is not in an SQL database (even if the original source is a database), but in QVD files. This makes it possible to use a much easier method: we can have the selected values inserted into inline tables, and then use them in ordinary LOAD statements.

Using an inline table with the selected values

The first step is to create the inline table:

selected_item_tab:
LOAD * INLINE [
 SELECTED_ITEM
 $(odso_ITEMID){"quote": "", "delimiter": ""} 
];

Item ID’s for all selected and optional items will then be injected into the script. By using prefix ‘odso’ we allow the user to make selections on any level in the ITEM dimension, like product groups etc.

You can then use the inline table when you load your actual data:

LOAD
  ITEM_ID,
  ...
FROM .....qvd (qvd)
WHERE EXISTS(SELECTED_ITEM,ITEM_ID);

This will filter the data so that only selected items are included. You can also combine several dimensions, like time or geography to further reduce the data. No variables or string parsing is needed. So far this seems to work well.

Getting used to the generated apps

Perhaps the most difficult part of the On Demand app generation remains. The generated apps will only select a subset of the data, and in some cases it won’t be obvious what the subset is. Qlik users are not really used to this. Selections will be a two-step process, where the actual analysis will work as we are used too, but the initial selection cannot be immediately changed. This is a new way of working for users. Also totals calculated in the generated app might be useful for reference, it must always be remembered that they are just for a subset. We will try to make the initial selections clearly visible to the user of the generated app, and perhaps we should also try to bring over some summarys etc for the complete data, but still users will have to think differently. That might be the real challenge with this.

Exporting Qlik Sense extensions to Powerpoint and PDF

Update 2020-06-27: Qlik sense has changed since I originally wrote this, up to date version of using a Promise can be found here:

Printing Qlik Sense extensions

One of the great new features in Qlik Sense is snapshots and storytelling. It allows you to create a snapshot of your visualizations, with the current selection state, and then include the snapshot in a story. Behind the scenes Qlik Sense also uses snapshot for export to PDF, PowerPoint and image. This makes it even more important for you to make your extension work well with snapshots. Sometimes this is however not easy…

The basics

To turn snapshots on, you need to include a few lines in your extension:

This will give you a context menu in the client with alternatives to create snapshot and export the visualization. That might be enough, but it might not be enough. To verify it you should:

  • create a snapshot of your extension, include it in a story and verify that it works
  • export your extension to PDF and/or PowerPoint (possibly also image)
  • and export the story to Powerpoint/PDF

You visualization is actually used in three contexts, that are somewhat different:

  1. the normal analyse mode, with live data, affected by changes in selection state
  2. the snapshot/story mode with a snapshot of data and the selection state as it was when the snapshot was created
  3. the export mode, which is also based on a snapshot, but run in a separate service on the server

To make it actually work in all, you might need to do some more work.

Make Qlik Sense wait for your extension

One problem, mainly in export, is to let Qlik Sense know when your extension actually is ready with the rendering. You might get just an empty area in your powerpoint, or just the header but no content. This might be because the image is taken before your extension is ready.

The mechanism to fix this is a javascript concept called a Promise. Your paint method should return a Promise, that resolves when the rendering is ready. Qlik Sense will then wait until the Promise is resolved and then grab the image.

This is described where briefly in Qlik Sense help under ‘Set up “finished rendering” notification, like this:

This will return a Promise, that immediately resolves. This might not be good enough, since you might want to wait for something until you resolve. In my case, I used highcarts and highcharts has a callback function that will be called when rendering is ready. The final solution is like this:

So, I create a deferred object before calling the Highcharts rendering method. I can then return the promise that belongs to the deferred, but I do not resolve it until Highcharts tells me that rendering is complete, actually I had to add an additional delay of 1 second to make sure. There is currently no documentation of qlik.Promise in Qlik Sense help, but you can look in the angularjs documentation.

Turn animations off

If it’s still not working, you should take a look at animations. Animations in analyse mode are good (if used the right way…) and might help the user discover insights in their data, but in export they should be turned off.

In Highcharts there are actually two flags you should turn off to diable animations. It might be enough to turn off just one of them, but why not both:

The isSnapshot flag which I use to determine if we are in analyse mode or in snapshot (story or export) is undocumented, so this solution might break in future Qlik Sense versions, but in September 2017 it works.