Uncategorized – Extending Qlik

A look at filters in Qlik Sense charts

One of the recent new features in Qlik Sense is the ability to add filters to charts, filters that applies only to the chart they are included in, not other charts. So far this is only available n Qlik Sense Clod. (Help is available here)

It has always been possible to filter data in a chart, but setting it up has been more complicated. The new feature makes it much easier and more straightforward, so it is surely a feature that will be welcomed.

Setting it up

To try this I’ll use a copy of the Demo App – Beginner’s tutorial that’s available in QlikSense Cloud If you want to follow along, open it in Qlik Sense Cloud and then make a copy of the sheet ‘ Product details’. Then click on ‘Edit sheet’ in your new sheet.

The filter option is only available in the new authoring mode, so make sure you’r not in the old one (called ‘Advanced options’). I’ll be using the chart ‘Sales and margin by Product Group’ but since that is actually a master object, and you can’t use the new authoring mode on master objects, I’ll firts have to unlink it, to make it no longer a master object. Once that is done, we’re ready to go.

This is what the sheet looks like when we start

Adding a filter

Filters are based on Qlik set expressions, but do not fear, there is help available to create the expressions. To add filters you use this little area:

First step is to enter the field namn (no, you cannot use dimensions). Do that, either by clicking Add and then searching for the field namn or by dragging and dropping the ‘Region’ field and you get a dialog like this:

Just select one or more regions and we are done:

To verify that it works, end edit mode and make some selections in the region field. Notice how the values in the other charts change, but not the values in our filtered chart, they will still be showing the values in the reion(s) we set in the filter (in my case Nordic). So far so good.

What does the filter affect??

But exactly what does the filter affect? It surely affects the data in the chart itself, but what about other expressions, like dynamic titles etc? Let’s try. Change the title of the chart to (you will probably need Advancd options for this):

=’Sales and Margin by Product Group. Total: ‘ & Sum(Sales)

And now you will have a sum added to your chart title. Switch to analysis mode again, and make some selections in the Region field. Notice that the sum in the title changes, so the filter does not affect the title.

The filter will only affect chart data, not dynamic titles etc. That’s important to be aware of if you are using dynamic titles.

Chart with filter and dynamic title. The filter does not affect the title.

Displaying the filter to users

As you might have noticed Qlik Sense shows the filter at the bottom of the visualization. That works pretty well in this case, but in many Qlik data models you have flags with name that are not so user friendly, or you might have fieldnames with prefixes or more cmplicated filters. If that is the case you can enter your own describing text as a footnote to the chart, like this:

And you will get your own text instead of the default one:

Custom filter description in the footnote

Behind the scenes

If you take a look at the properties of your visualization (I use my own Chrome extension for this) you can find your filters in their own structure:

Using this structure Qlik Sense then generates the actual set expression (qContextSetExpression) that is used:

Printing Qlik Sense extensions

From time to time I get questions from Qlik customers and partners with some problem regarding Qlik Sense extensions or mashups. Usually this means a few hours of troubleshooting and hopefully fixing something, fun and interesting. Could be extensions that break when Qlik Sense is upgraded, performance issues or some feature that doesn’t work.

A recurring problem is with printing extension objects. Many customers don’t care whether this works, they don’t use NPrinting or it’s not relevant for their extensions, but some do. And if they have problems, it can be a challenge to solve them if you have never done it before.

How does it work

Qlik Sense uses snapshots for printing. That means what’s printed is not what you see on your screen, but a snapshot of the data in the extension, that is then re-rendered by the rendering engine and eventually printed. There is no live connection to the Qlik Sense engine available during this re-rendering, which means that everything that needs a live connection is not available. That’s why you should always base your rendering only on the layout.

So, a first step is to verify that the extension does not do any calls that require an engine connection in the rendering part (they can be used in the property panel, and in many cases are to fill dropdown lists with content etc). This might require some refactoring to solve and so might take some time, but in most cases this is not the problem.

Waiting for the extension to be ready

A more common problem is that the printing is made before the extension is ready. This might mean that printing works sometimes, but not all of the time. It might also mean that the printout is partial, showing the extension when parts of it are rendered, but not all of it etc.

To solve this you need to return a Promise and make sure it is not resolved until your rendering is complete, something like this:

paint: function ($element, layout) {
  // do your rendering
  return new qlik.Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
    // when rendering is complete, call resolve
    resolve();
    // optionally if rendering fails, call reject 
    reject();
  });
} //end of print function

The Promise supplied by Qlik now follows the standard javascript API (though it looks like it isn’t the standard) unlike in previuos releases where it was essentially angular $p service. I’m afraid that means the code I’ve published earlier in this blog no longer works, the code above is how it should be.

Work status

Things have changed! In December of 2022 I finished the pretty large project which has taken up most of my time for the last two years. This means that I can now make room for other projects, even if full-tme projects are still not possible.

I also hope to have some time for this blog, and my Chrome extensions. And there are some other pretty cool stuff on the way.

Remote contracts are the easiest to find time for, and most of the work I do can be made remotely, so please get in touch if you need help with Qlik Sense mashups, extensions or integration. Stuff I can help you with:

development of mashups and extensions
lower level integration using the Qlik Engine API, possibly together with other APIs
extension and mashup strategy: when and how to use them, what to check for in an extension or mashup
maintenance of extensions
troubleshooting and performance problems
validating (and fixing) extensions and mashups with new Qlik Sense versions

Recently I have helped customers and partners with among other things:

make extensions work with NPrinting (pretty common problem, I’m afraid)
building a generic write-back solution with extension and back-end service
advanced extension development
making sure extensions work on a mashup hosted on a web server (not Qlik)
trobleshooting performance problems in a mashup, using my Chrome add-on Add Sense
moving solutions to Qlik Sense SaaS environment

Best way to reach me is through mail: erik at upper88.com

Who am I? Getting the user id in a Qlik Sense Extension or mashup

Sometimes you need to know who the user is in your Qlik Sense extension or mashup. Perhaps you want to help the user filling in some data, display notifications to the user or something else that I can’t even think of.

getAuthenticatedUser call

There is no property containing user id (at least not someone that I know of), you’ll need to call an API one way or the other. The relevant call in the API is getAuthenticatedUser(), available on the global object.

In an extension, you should use the global property available on the app, so the call would be app.global.getAuthenticatedUser(). In a mashup it depends.. If you need to do this before the app is opened, you could use qlik.getGlobal(config) to get the global object. But be aware that this will mean another open web socket. If you can wait, it’s better to use app.global, since that means you will reuse the existing web socket.

Like most API calls, getAuthenticatedUser() is asynchronous, so you need to call it like this:

qlik.currApp(this).global.getAuthenticatedUser().then(function(reply){
    console.log('user',reply.qReturn);
});

If you run this in Qlik Sense Desktop, you should get the string ‘Personal\Me’. But in Qlik Sense Enterprise it’s a bit more complicated. Ehen I run it I get: ‘UserDirectory=UPPER88QS; UserId=erik’. So this is a string, which contains two key-value pairs. You’ll need to parse this, to grab the UserId, or if you really want both values (perhaps you have more than one UserDirectory? Perhaps this is different between production – test – development?

Using OSUser()

But there is another method. Youd could use the Qlik Script system function OSUser(). In a mashup this is probably not a great idea, since you would need to either create a generic object containing OSUser(), or call the Evaluate method, not even included in Capabilities API, only in Enigma.

But in an extension the framework always creates a generic object for you and gets the layout. So you could add ‘OSUser’ to your initialProperties, and get the result in your layout, something like this:

initialProperties: {
   user: {
      qStringExpression: '=OSUser()'
   }
},

In most cases you would of course have other stuff in your properties too, and they can easily be combined. Don’t show this in your property panel, if you don’t want your users to be able to change it.

This will mean that you in layout.user will have the user the same way as when you called getAuthenticatedUser(), you will probably need to parse it, but you don’t have to handle the fact that is it asynchronous.

A warning

This is all client side. That means it’s not really safe, you should not use this to restrict user access – it’s OK to use this to hide operations from the user that they should not be allowed to use, but you need to verify the user serverside too, in a safe way, that can not be hacked. But that’s another topic…

Pros and cons of Qlik Sense mashups

Recently I got the question on if I would recommend using Qlik Sense mashups. That got me thinking, of course the question is not so simple: it all depends. As with most things there are pros and cons…

Why would you use Qlik Sense mashups?

There are several reasons for using Qlik Sense mashups. A very common one is that you want to apply your companys profile and have a look-and-feel more like that you have for other systems. When I started building mashups for customers Qlik Sense hade no support for theming, so if you wanted to change things like fonts you needed to do that in a mashup. Now you can do this in a theme, but I honestly don’t know how much custom themes are used today.

Another common reason is that you want navigation to work another way than it does in Qlik Sense. Perhaps put sheets in a hierarchical structure or have views targeted to different user categories.

You might also mobile support to work differently than it does in standard Qlik Sense. In a mashup you can leverage open source CSS framework like Bootstrap or Bulma which gives you possibilities you do not have in the built-in Qlik Sense client.

Another reason is to simplify the user interface. In a mashup you can focus on the workflow that’s most important for your users (usually analyse data) and skip features like edit mode, storytelling, data load and modelling. This could potentially let your users get started faster and reduce the need for training, a big cost in a large dashboard projects.

You might also want to add features not in the standard Qlik Sense client. Examples could be commenting, writeback, sharing, exports not covered in the standard client, integration with other systems. Features like alternate state and default (startup) bookmark used to fall in this category, but are now included in the standard clent.

Problems with using Qlik Sense mashups

You should realize that mashups require HTML, CSS and javascript knowledge, a skillset most Qlik developers don’t have. You need to make sure you have both web developer skills and Qlik skills in your organization, whether you have that inhouse or work with a partner. And even though there are lots of web developers out there, very few of them know how to work with the Qlik APIs.

And the javascript environment is changing fast. While Qlik script has changed little in the 12 years I have worked with Qlik, the javascript environment has changed a lot. The language has a lot of new features, and frameworks, build tools and libraries has changed even more, so that the environment used in many mashups, with angularjs 1.x, today is pretty old and completely different frameworks (React etc) dominate, at least in new projects.

The tools included with Qlik Sense, like dev-hub, the Mashup Editor and the templates included makes it easy to create a mashup with only drag-and-drop and really no programming, but for production level projects it really is not enough. You would want stuff like multi-page support (including only loading Qlik Sense objects when they are needed), version handling and a dev environment where you can use npm packages, build tools etc.

Some advice on mashup development

So, you have decided that your use case is best solved with mashups. But how should you go about developing it? Here are some advice based on my experience with building mashups.

Recognize that you need web developer skills. The mashups itself is largely a web developer project. You need experience on web development, and on troubleshooting and debugging web apps. Someone with deep knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript and Qlik APIs is needed.

Web developer skills is not all. For users the most important part of your mashup is the data. For that you still need Qlik developer skills. In many cases you would have two kind of developers, those building charts and those working on the mashup itself.

Use version control. I used to say that version control is what differentiate professional development from private hacks. Today this is no longer true, even many hobby projects use version control. Set it up early in your project, commit changes often, make suire you know exactly what code runs in production.

Separate Qlik Object definitions from the javascript code. Try to avoid having Qlik Sense object definitions, field names etc in the actual code. Separate object id’s etc into separate configuration files or use tags in the Qlik Sense apps. This improves reusability of your mashup code and simplifies things a lot.

Use a CSS framework. A CSS framework like Bootstrap or Bulma helps you a lot with making your mashup responsive and good-looking. You might want to modify it by overriding the styles with your profile colors, fonts etc, but add those later.

Files in Qlik Sense extensions

Qlik Sense allows you to add extensions to your installation. In a server environment you do this by importing a zip file, containing one or several extensions. In Qlik Sense Desktop you can unzip (the same) zip file to a directory under Documents/Qlik/Sense/Extensions.

The qext file

The qext file is what defines the extension. It’s a JSON file, it has to be valid JSON, but very few properties are mandatory. The qext file defines the extension root, Qlik Sense will make files the directory where the qext file and all directories under it available for HTTP calls to the server. So if you add an extension with the file xxxx.qext, you can fetch the file from the server with:

HTTP GET /extensions/xxxx/xxxx.qext

And all other files in the extension can also be fetched the same way:

HTTP GET /extensions/xxxx/xxxx.js

Sub-directories can also be used:

HTTP GET /extensions/xxxx/lib/jquery.js

Not that the directory name on disk is not relevant. On Qlik Sense Desktop you can build your own directory structure. Extensions in Dashbord bundle and Visualization bundle are kept in their own sub-directory, which doesn’t affect the URL used to load them. But if you do build a structure for your extensions, be careful that you do not keep duplicates of the same extensions. If you do you will not know which copy is actually loaded.

Multiple qext files

You can also have multiple qext files in the same zip file, which will mean that several extensions, and their files, are made available. Qlik Sense Enterprise will not allow you to have more than one qext file in the same directory, you can do this in Qlik Sense Desktop, but it is confusing, so you probably shouldn’t.

Multiple qext files is useful when you want to use the same files in more than one extension, like some library, CSS files etc. You can then put common files in one directory and add a qext file in it to make it available for all extensions. By putting them in the same zip file you make sure that they are updated at the same time as the extensions using the library. Another effect is that if the user is using two different extensions that use the same library, files will only be downloaded once. If every extension has it’s own copy of a library, it will be downloaded multiple times.

For Qlik Sense Enterprise you have no control over how the extension files are stored. It is not hard to find the files on disk, but the repository is responsible for storing them and serving to the client.

The extension type

One of the fields you always should have in the qext file is the type. In a visualization extension, that you should be able to use in the Qlik Sense client, it should be set to ‘visualization’:

"type": "visualization",

If you set it to something else, the Qlik Sense client will not load it and your users will not be able to create visualizations using it.

For mashups it is usually set to ‘mashup’:

"type": "mashup",

This is not absolutely necessary, your mashup will still work even if you set the type to something else, but if you want to manage it and possibly edit the file in Qlik Sense dev-hub you need to set the type to ‘mashup’. That also means that if you want to hide your mashup in dev-hub, set the type to something else (perhaps ‘webapp’ ?).

There are also a few other types used by Qlik Sense: ‘visualization-template’ and ‘mashup-template’. These types are used for the templates used in dev-hub when you create a new visualization or mashup.

If you plan to build several mashups creating a good mashup template with the look-and-feel you want might be a good choice.

The wbfolder.wbl file

One of the most misunderstood file in extensions is the wbfolder.wbl file. It is simply a list of files in the extension, with one line for every file, terminated by semicolon:

com-qliktech-horizlist.js; com-qliktech-horizlist.qext; horizlist.css;

The wbfolder.wbl file is not mandatory. It is not needed for your extension for work, if you do have one it does not need to contain all files. It is only used by the dev-hub editors. Without it you cannot open or duplicate the extension in dev-hub.

If you do have it, only the files listed in wbfolder.wbl will be available in the editors. Also only the files in wbfolder.wbl will be copied if you make a copy of the extension or mashup. The other files will stil be available over HTTP, Qlik Sense will serve them.

A scenario I have seen used, is that a web developer buiilds a mashup, but then users (super-users ??) can modify files in it, like HTML, CSS or configuration files. In that case you can add a wbfolder.wbl to the extension containing just the files users should be able modify, but not other stuff, like libraries, possibly some JavaScript etc.

Qlik Sense Business Analyst certification

Yesterday I did the Qlik Sense Business analyst certification exam. Even though I’ve worked with the product since the development started and as a contractor since 2016 I have never done it before.

Certifications are good: they force you to make sure you cover more of the product. If you’ve worked with a product for a while, you tend to know parts of the product very well but might have missed some stuff completely. The certification forces you to fill in the gaps (or at least some of them..) and learn those features you never used in your projects. Perhaps you pick up something that comes handy in your next project. Personally I learned a lot on the Data Manager and quite a few visualizations I have never used.

The exam situation is pretty special. When I have taken certification exams previously (some time ago..) I have done it at testing centers, but this time I did it from home, probably the only possibility in the current Coron situation, and certainly the only one I would do. But then I had to clear my desk completely (never happened before), stay at my desk for the full exam (two hours) and keep my eyes on the screen, all very strange for me, who normally gets up and walk around a lot.

The exam is good: pretty difficult questions that really tests your knowledge. Taking it without having worked with the product, just from reading books and other material would be very hard, almost impossible.

It is available only in English. A tips when preparing, if you are not native english speaking, is to make sure you run Qlik Sense in english, to get the terminology right. You can do that by running Qlik Sense in the browser and adding ‘/language/en’ to the URL.

And I did make it, with a score of 76% (you need 58%). Feels good!

All good things must end

After more than two years at IKEA, my work with them has now ended. It has been a fantastic journey, with the introduction of a global Qlik Sense dashboard with support both for desktop and mobile and a set of Qlik Sense extensions with the IKEA profile and covering their needs (well, perhaps not everything, but quite a lot of them). I am very happy to have been a part of this, I think we have been able to do amazing things.

My work at Qlik continues. The Advanced Authoring project moves forward, hopefully you will see some really interesting stuff in upcoming Qlik Sense releases. Looks like I will continue helping them a few months more. After that I’m not yet book, so if you ahve an interesting project starting after the summer where you need help with Qlik Sense development, please let me know.

Apart from that I’m in some discussions about other work in the Qlik Sense area And of course, I’m preparing for Master Summit in Stockholm!

Welcome

This is a blog about extending Qlik Sense. Qlik Sense has excellent support for using Qlik objects in your own web page or app. With the tools supplied with the product you can drag-and-drop charts from your Qlik app into a web page and get it injected into basically any web page without programming. That is not what this blog is about.

Instead I will try to go a bit deeper. Probably everything in this blog will be based on actually programming, that is writing, mainly Javascript, code. Even if you can get a web page up in minutes, without writing a line of code, when you try to do things a bit more advanced you will soon need to understand how to actually program the stuff. And even if you start out with the autogenerated pages from Qlik Sense mashup editor, it will be useful for you to understand the code created for you.

Looking at the material I have for this blog I realize that some of it (possibly all of it) is not easy. You need to know a bit about programming and have an interest in learning more. You probably also need to know something about Qlik.