I have been working with QlikView since 2006. Since I started, the way in which QlikView has been deployed has changed considerably.
Originally, the majority of implementations were individual desktop licenses. There was a user license distinction between Developer, Professional, and Analyzer, with different rights between them. The Developer would create QlikView documents, load data from the database, and then pass over to the Professional to create the UI. The Analyzer user would just open QlikView documents but couldn't edit them.
The QlikView Server was quite a young product. There was also a sister product called QlikView Publisher—but that had a different development cycle and different version numbers. The clients were QlikView Desktop, IE Plugin, Java, and the embryonic Ajax Zero Footprint. The Management Console was a Windows executable file.
Version 8 of QlikView brought the development of Server and Publisher together (well, they had the same version number anyway!). Every deployment of Server could have a "Standard" license of Publisher, which allowed reload tasks only. Enterprise Publisher required a license and had a separate management console. The important thing to note was the improved Ajax ZFC client and the ability to manually generate the HTML code for a site from within QlikView Desktop. That made the QlikView Desktop very easy to deploy and made it a real alternative to the IE plugin. Developers no longer had to enter a license key; they could "Borrow" their user CAL from the server into their client.
Version 9 brought the management of QlikView Server and Publisher together, into a single, web-based management console. Well, actually there were two! The QlikView Management Console (QMC—a simplified interface especially for managing single server implementations) and the QlikView Enterprise Management Console (QEMC—a more advanced interface especially for managing multiple server deployments). To enable Publisher, you just added the license key, and the Publisher options became available. We no longer had to manually generate the HTML for the Ajax ZFC. You just needed to deploy the QVW and it would appear in the AccessPoint; if a user opened it, the HTML was generated automatically. Licensing also changed, and we got rid of the old Developer/Professional/Analyzer licenses and replaced them with just the Named User license, which you borrow (although now renamed to "Lease") from the server. Document licenses were introduced later.
Version 10 brought some great performance improvements, and a new skin for QMC and QEMC. There were also some advancements made in APIs that allowed the development of applications that made calls to the Management Service to retrieve information—this was the genesis of the power tools. Extension objects for the Ajax client were introduced. The old Java client was dropped. Service releases later saw the Ajax client become gesture-aware so that it could be used on iPads and Android devices.
Version 11, the current version, got rid of QMC and just uses QEMC, although this has actually been renamed as QMC! There were many great improvements, including a really good re-design of the Ajax views. The Ajax ZFC client is now a valid default client for organizations. Other features for the Ajax client, such as session collaboration, are not available in other clients. Document extensions have been introduced.
I feel lucky, in a way, that we started selling QlikView at that time when more deals started to include QlikView Server instead of standalone implementations. Now, more than 100 implementations later, almost all of them have been server based. We have implemented all of the options across our various clients, and have hit, and resolved, many roadblocks along the way.
In this book, short as it is, I have tried to distill as much of the knowledge gathered over all those years into these pages. I hope that you find it useful.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with QlikView Server, begins the journey with details of the supported Windows platforms for the QlikView Server, the things that you are going to need to consider before implementation, the hardware considerations, the different types of licenses available, and the deployment options.
Chapter 2, Standard Installation Process, goes step-by-step through a standard installation of QlikView Server, where all components are installed on one box.
Chapter 3, Exploring the QlikView Management Console in Detail, introduces us to the QMC, the main management tool that we use with QlikView Server and other QlikView services.
Chapter 4, Managing and Securing QlikView Documents, looks at different methods of securing QlikView documents as well as some of the other properties that we can manage via the QMC.
Chapter 5, Installing QlikView Server Enterprise, walks through a full implementation of QlikView Server services on multiple servers, including implementing a QlikView Server Cluster.
Chapter 6, Configuring the QlikView Publisher, explains how to configure options for QlikView Publisher and how to create a trigger reload and other tasks.
Chapter 7, Alternative Authentication and Authorization Methods, goes through the different options for authentication beyond Active Directory, by using QlikView's DMS authentication models, including LDAP, HTTP header, and Custom Ticket Exchange (CTE).
Chapter 8, Monitoring and Troubleshooting QlikView Server, reviews the log files that you need to know about in order to monitor the services and resolve issues, and also looks at some of the tools available to help you administer the QlikView Server.
You need to have a server or PC that is capable of running QlikView Server (refer to Chapter 1, Getting Started with QlikView Server, for details). You will need access to the QlikView Downloads site or know someone who does (for example, a QlikView Partner), and have some kind of license for QlikView Server.
If you are not an existing customer of QlikView, you won't have access to the downloads or have a license. In that case, you will need to engage with a QlikView Partner to access the files and to obtain an evaluation license for QlikView Server.
If you are a server administrator willing to learn about how to deploy QlikView Server for server management, analysis and testing, and use QlikView Publisher for publishing of business content, then this is the perfect book for you. No prior experience with QlikView is necessary.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, path names, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "To get a "clean" uninstall, we can uninstall and then manually delete the ProgramData\QlikTech folder."
A block of code is set as follows:
Option Explicit ' Establish some variables Dim sServer, sSuccessURL, sFailURL Dim sUser, sGroups, sGroupList Dim sURL, sRequest, sResult, sTicket Dim iStart
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
QMSEDX.exe -task="Sales Analysis.qvw" -pwd=mypassword
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The QlikView Desktop has the option to Open in Server and connect to a QlikView Server to open a document."
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