Book Image

QlikView for Developers Cookbook

By : Stephen Redmond
Book Image

QlikView for Developers Cookbook

By: Stephen Redmond

Overview of this book

QlikView has been around since 1993, but has only really taken off in recent years as a leader in the in-memory BI space and, more recently, in the data discovery area. QlikView features the ability to consolidate relevant data from multiple sources into a single application, as well as an associative data model to allow you to explore the data to a way your brain works, state-of-the-art visualizations, dashboard, analysis and reports, and mobile data access. QlikView for Developers Cookbook builds on your initial training and experiences with QlikView to help you become a better developer. This book features plenty of hands-on examples of many challenging functions. Assuming a basic understanding of QlikView development, this book provides a range of step-by-step exercises to teach you different subjects to help build your QlikView developer expertise. From advanced charting and layout to set analysis; from advanced aggregations through to scripting, performance, and security, this book will cover all the areas that you need to know about. The recipes in this book will give you a lot of the information that you need to become an excellent QlikView developer.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
QlikView for Developers Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Charts are the most important area of QlikView because they are the main method of information delivery, and QlikView is all about information delivery.

There are a few terms that I want to just define before we get cracking, just to make sure you know what I am talking about.

The basis of every chart is some kind of calculation—you add up some numbers or you count something. In QlikView, these calculations are called expressions. Every chart should have at least one expression. In fact, some charts require more than one expression.

Most of the time, the expression value that is calculated is not presented in isolation. The calculation is normally made for each of the values in a category. This category is generally the values within a field of data, for example, country or month, in the QlikView data model, but it could be a more complex calculated value. Either way, in QlikView charts, this category is called a dimension. Some charts, such as a gauge, would normally never have any dimension. Other charts, such as a pivot table, will often have more than one dimension.

Many simple charts will have just one dimension and one expression. For historical and mathematical reasons, the dimension is sometimes called the X-Axis and the expression is sometimes called the Y-Axis and you may see these terms used in QlikView.