Hi Jane – usually my first day on site is often the basis on which I can win more days, if I get the ‘where to start’ wrong that is also where it finishes! People don’t usually want to hear they have got things badly wrong – so it is a balancing act between propping up what is already there and starting to build proper foundations. This is all part of the fun of QlikView consultancy!

Where do you start if you have been hired for just a few days?

You really need to go back to basics, out a QVD layer in, design the best data structures, move as much as possible in the ETL and maybe provide a structured QVW for binary loads, but that won’t fix XYZ chart for Fred Bloggs in Accounts in a few minutes which is what they hired you for.

I get quite disheartened sometimes because what ever I end up doing I know it’s not the best solution. It never can be.

Indeed. Use of Excel and the Concatenate and Substitute functions have saved me lots of effort in the past.

Hi Adam.
Almost regardless of situation I would avoid Qualify. A way of achieving a similar, but more flexible, result is to build your load statement in Excel. To do this, get a list of fields in the given table and paste these into Excel, into column A. In column B put the following expression:
=CONCATENATE(A1, ” as [TableName “, A1, “],”)
Now, copy that expression the whole way down the list of fields. Finally, copy and paste column B back into your QlikView document and you have code for qualified fields in a manageable way. You can also then tidy up the field names, getting capitalisation and spaces sorted.

Different documents for different purposes is not an issue, in my opinion, as long as you have designed for each audience and properly thought through how to best leverage your ETL layer to support multiple presentation documents.

Idealy a combination of section access, show hide variables and good design should limit the need to copy paste qlikview documents.

I think best practice is to avoid the Qualify statement in production as you say, although if there are hundreds of fields involved and a short delivery time frame it may still get in there, just need to make sure to clearly comment the code!!! I wrote an article about handling challenging clients also on webofwork.com.

Thanks for your comment Henric. It’s always good to get confirmation that my thinking on these things are on the right track.

Couldn’t agree more.

HIC