Much of Qlik’s focus is today on their cloud products. Getting up and running with Qlik Sense Business (the name Qlik uses for their entry-level cloud product) is easy. And even if the hub is different and there is no QMC, it feels familiar. After all it’s the same engine behind the scenes. Many (probably most) extension will also work, since the extension API is the same, and the Capabilities API also the same – almost. But even though the methods are all there, some of them actually don’t give the same result.
The global object in the Capabilities API
The differences I have found are in the global object, as should be expected. (documentation is here). So let’s try it.
The first method is getAppList(). In Qlik Sense Desktop or Qlik Sense Enterprise (which is Qlik’s name on the product you install yourself on a windows server) this method will give you a list of all apps the currently authorized user has access to. In Qlik Sense Business it still works, but if you try it, it looks something like this:
In my Qlik Sense Business hub, I’ve got four apps, but getAppList only returns the one I am currently using. So if your extension uses getAppList to create a list of other apps, it won’t work in Qlik Sense Business.
Another frequently used method in the global object is getAuthenticatedUser(). You use it to find out the users id. In Qlik Sense Desktop you’ll get ‘Personal\\Me’, in Qlik Sense Enterprise you’ll get a string containing UserId and UserDirectory. In qlik Sense Business it looks like this:
So, while the format is the same as in Qlik Sense Enterprise, the content is different. The UserDirectory is empty, and the UserId is actually the IdP subject you can find in the cloud console (IdP stands for Identity Provider).
callRepository
The Capabilities APIs has one method designed to call the repository, originally built to call Qlik Sense Enterprise REST API called callRepository(). It is marked as Deprecated, but it is still there in Qlik Sense Enterprise, and looks like it’s there in Qlik Sense Business too. What happens if we try it?
Qlik Sense Cloud has the REST endpoint /api/v1/items to list apps the user has access to. If we try it, it looks like this:
We do get a warning in the console, but the call works, the data array actually contains the four apps I’ve got in my Qlik Sense Business hub. But since it is deprecated we probably shouldn’t use it but use some standard method of making a REST call instead.