Book Image

QlikView for Developers

By : Miguel Angel Garcia, Barry Harmsen
Book Image

QlikView for Developers

By: Miguel Angel Garcia, Barry Harmsen

Overview of this book

QlikView is one of the most flexible and powerful Business Intelligence platforms around. If you want to build data into your organization, build it around QlikView. Don't get caught in the gap between data and knowledge – find out how QlikView can help you unlock insights and data potential with ease. Whether you're new to QlikView or want to get up to speed with the features and functionality of QlikView, this book starts at a basic level and delves more deeply to demonstrate how to make QlikView work for you, and make it meet the needs of your organization. Using a real-world use-case to highlight the extensive impact of effective business analytics, this book might well be your silver bullet for success. A superb hands-on guide to get you started by exploring the fundamentals of QlikView before learning how to successfully implement it, technically and strategically. You'll learn valuable tips, tricks, and insightful information on loading different types of data into QlikView, and how to model it effectively. You will also learn how to write useful scripts for QlikView to handle potentially complex data transformations in a way that is simple and elegant. From ensuring consistency and clarity in your data models, to techniques for managing expressions using variables, this book makes sure that your QlikView projects are organized in a way that's most productive for you and key stakeholders.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
QlikView for Developers
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Using variables


Simply put, variables in QlikView are used to store data, either static or dynamic, and they can contain text, numbers, or any other data type. They are stored as a separate entity and are given a name to be able to reference them from any object in the whole document.

Even when one variable can store a single data value, their use can be extended to a much broader scope once we understand its inner workings.

At a general level, we can say that variables in QlikView are used in two different ways:

  • To store a value or string either static or based on a formula. This type of variable can also be used to receive and interpret input from the user.

  • To store an expression definition that can be used in charts. This is an approach we explored in Chapter 7, Building Dashboards.

The main difference between the previously mentioned options is that one calculates the output before sending it to the sheet object that makes use of the variable, whereas the other stores only the definition...