Book Image

Mastering Qlik Sense

By : Juan Ignacio Vitantonio
Book Image

Mastering Qlik Sense

By: Juan Ignacio Vitantonio

Overview of this book

Qlik Sense is a powerful, self-servicing Business Intelligence tool for data discovery, analytics and visualization. It allows you to create personalized Business Intelligence solutions from raw data and get actionable insights from it. This book is your one-stop guide to mastering Qlik Sense, catering to all your organizational BI needs. You'll see how you can seamlessly navigate through tons of data from multiple sources and take advantage of the various APIs available in Qlik and its components for guided analytics. You'll also learn how to embed visualizations into your existing BI solutions and extend the capabilities of Qlik Sense to create new visualizations and dashboards that work across all platforms. We also cover other advanced concepts such as porting your Qlik View applications to Qlik Sense,and working with Qlik Cloud. Finally, you'll implement enterprise-wide security and access control for resources and data sources through practical examples. With the knowledge gained from this book, you'll have become the go-to expert in your organization when it comes to designing BI solutions using Qlik Sense.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Qlik Sense Self-Service Model, is about understanding the essence of self-service, the significance of empowering the business user, and what types of use cases of self-service exist. It will teach you to identify the correct use cases for using Qlik Sense and advising the business on how and why to leverage self-service Business Intelligence.

Chapter 2, Transitioning from QlikView to Qlik Sense, is a comparison of QlikView and Qlik Sense, focusing on the differences and similarities between the two technologies. You will learn the differences between QlikView and Qlik Sense. You will learn how to prepare for Qlik Sense, and see what new stuff needs to be learned, differences, and commonalities between the two technologies.

Chapter 3, Security Rules: Attribute Based Access Control, explains that Qlik Sense has introduced a new concept of security rules for applying non-data-level permissions called Attribute-Based Access Control. This chapter will teach you this new concept and will let you become proficient with the security rules and translate permission requirements into security rules logic.

Chapter 4, Master Items in Qlik Sense, explains that with a new type of digital asset has been introduced, called Master Items. This chapter will focus on understanding the concept of master items (MI), how to work with them and how to deploy them within the scope of a Self-Service model. It will let you become proficient with the different types of MI and advise users how and when to use MI.

Chapter 5, Qlik Sense on Cloud, Qlik Sense is now also offered as a solution on the cloud. This is a novel concept of deploying business intelligence solutions, and this chapter will elaborate on this model and its difference from traditional local Qlik Sense deployments. After reading this chapter, you will understand the Qlik Sense Software as a Service model, know how to deploy a cloud-based solution, and understand when to use and when not to use cloud-based solutions.

Chapter 6, Qlik Sense Data Modeling, offers a description of how Qlik stores its data in-memory, and what implications it has on data modeling. The chapter will look at dimensional data modeling in detail, using best practices from Ralph Kimball in Qlik Sense, while also covering optimization exercises to reduce the RAM footprint and calculation time on the front-end. After reading this chapter, you will understand many of the available data modeling techniques and you will be able to create efficient and optimized data models for Qlik Sense apps.

Chapter 7, Best Practice for Loading Data in Qlik Sense, educates the user about various types of data loading concepts in Qlk Sense, the concept of an ETL approach and its importance, and how to implement it in Qlik Sense (both Desktop and Enterprise). You will be able to identify data sources, know how to organize data to facilitate the loading process, develop an ETL strategy for his project, and master loading techniques such as incremental or partial reloads.

Chapter 8, Advanced Scripting, covers various advanced ways to script and write sophisticated ETL code within Qlik Sense to facilitate all the data modeling and data loading techniques described in chapters 6 and 7. It will show you how to load data from sources in their most efficient way, transform tables in every possible way, and write useful and resilient code using control structures.

Chapter 9, Advanced Expressions in Qlik Sense, shows how to leverage Qlik Sense’s powerful in-memory calculation engine while understanding all the concepts of its expressions. At the same time, these expressions always need to be implemented efficiently to avoid jeopardizing the user experience.

Chapter 10, Overview of Qlik Sense APIs, is about giving an extensive overview of what an API is, which APIs are available in Qlik Sense, and how to usually take advantage of technology with an API. It will familiarize you with all 19 APIs in Qlik Sense. You will understand the implications of an API and recognize use cases for the API. It will also cover Qlik's open source initiatives.

Chapter 11, Working with the Qlik Dev Hub, Qlik has its own user-friendly Qlik Sense development environment called Qlik Dev Hub. This chapter will describe the Qlik Sense development environment, how it is organized, and how to set it up for development. It will leave you with right know-how to utilize the dev hub and organize and govern the dev-hub work and modules.

Chapter 12, Coding in Qlik Sense, is for Qlik developers who have never had exposure to web development. It will describe all the languages and libraries used in Qlik, extension development, the reason JavaScript is used, and considerations when developing extensions or mashups for mobile. You will internalize the concept of web development and how HTML5 and JS code are read by the browser, understand the concepts of the most relevant JS libraries for Qlik, be able to read and write underlying code written in JavaScript, and debug web development code.

Chapter 13, Creating Extensions in Qlik Sense, demonstrates how to leverage the Extension API to build compelling visualizations using the D3.js library and control components using AngularJS. It will emphasize teaching how to write the code, best practices, and how to structure your extensions, including their property panel. Two step-by-step guides will help you internalize the steps required to build extensions for Qlik Sense, and you will be able to work with Qlik's Generic Objects such as the HyperCube for even more amazing projects.

Chapter 14, Integrating QS in Websites via Mashups, Mashups are probably the aspect of Qlik Sense with unlimited possibilities, and they allow the technology to tackle almost every requirement. While building mashups becomes web development predominantly, several aspects need to be considered when integrating Qlik objects. This chapter will teach you how to set up a Mashup project, connect to the Qlik engine, and import and embed Qlik Visualizations and Objects into applications sitting outside of Qlik Sense. You will learn how to develop basic mashup HTML pages, how to read the code in a mashup, how to deploy successful mashup projects, when to use mashups, and when not to.