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villegasi03
Creator
Creator

Is there a way to better organize QVDs and the apps that use them?

I feel a bit silly asking this but does anyone know of any neat tricks, suggestions, advice or even a custom qlikview app to help in organizing QV Applications & QVDs. After years of using Qlikview and turnover, well its become a cluster. Its getting difficult trying to figure out what cloud produced what QVD and where the files are actually being used and by what app. I began the painstaking task of going through all of our scripts (clouds and applications) and writing down what they are using and where the data originated. I have began puting the info into a simple excel sheet which I later plan on putting into something like Microsoft Visio in order to get a better idea of our current state. Ultimately I want to be as efficient as possible and reduce the confusion when developing similar applications using the same information.

Any suggestions on tools or advice that can help me with this project would be much appreciated. I can wish for the "EASY" button on this one but its wishful thinking but I am not looking for that. Just wondering if anyone else out there has ran into the same issue and what you did to help solve the problem. enviornmentt

Thank you

7 Replies
johnw
Champion III
Champion III

I could swear I've seen a QlikView application that tells which applications use which QVDs and which fields. Probably from Rob Wunderlich, but I don't see anything in his downloads on his site. Maybe it was something he wrote for us directly at some point, but nothing on our server is jumping out at me either. Maybe I'm misremembering something else, like his document analyzer. Maybe I'm just making this all up because I want there to be such a thing badly enough that it makes me imagine there is such a thing.

villegasi03
Creator
Creator
Author

No you are not!! I was thinking the exact same thing. I dont know where I got it in my head that there was something on user community that was doing something similar.

Another developer at my company, I think he is high up there in our IT department, created an app once that would help track appliciations. I dont know how he did it but the app pretty much was reading the fiel properties such as owners, last modified and created date. I remember thinking to myselft what a neat app but didnt see any use for it. Boy how I wish I would have asked him about it but hes not longer with us.

Anonymous
Not applicable

This doesn't help you with you easy button but I use an approach that works for me. Any "extract" routine that "simply" fetches source data and writes it into a qvd is called E_TABLENAME.QVW and it produces E_TABLENAME.QVD. If you have tables of the same name in different databases you might want to have a database cojmponent to that name. If the QVD is a "downstream" QVD with transformations that make it structurally different from the original source table then its called T_TABLENAME.QVW -> T_TABLENAME.QVD.

That means I have "lots" of QVW's because there is at least on QVW per table that I need. More if the table need transforming. However, now i have all the source data represented as QVD's and with my catologue (excel spreadsheet) of QVW's it obvious to me what qvd it produces.

THis doesn't help with the "which app uses what qvd's" question but its a start for organizing you back room extrtact and transform activities.

Not applicable

An awesome feature request would be the ability to customise the QvdTableHeader on each QVD. You could not only write to it but also have parameters like "current CONNECT TO" or "Host name".

Dibs on copyright 😛

the only other thing to do is output some text using an inline block, e.g. computername, connectstring, documentname etc whenever you create QVDs

Anonymous
Not applicable

Interesting but at any point in time many applications can use the same QVD (so header would need to be dynamic in growth) and they are not really connected to it but rather load some or all of it into memory. Now you could write your own custom bit of application script that logs when a QVD is used by an application.

villegasi03
Creator
Creator
Author

Great ideas guys! This is certainly is making the wheels turn. Do qvds and qvws have "metadata"/"document properties" attached to them like a word document or certain image files? I think at least some of that info would be useful and if there were any property fields then even better. Another thing I was thinking about is related to another of the posts (I'm sorry didnt get the users name) was maybe suggesting that users (we are a team of 4) who create any qvd include an "artificial" field which contains document informaiton. Isnt there a function that returns document level information? I dont know but like I said its starting to make the wheels turn so optimizim is starting to be creep in. Thanks.

villegasi03
Creator
Creator
Author

Great ideas guys! This is certainly is making the wheels turn. Do qvds and qvws have "metadata"/"document properties" attached to them like a word document or certain image files? I think at least some of that info would be useful and if there were any property fields then even better. Another thing I was thinking about is related to another of the posts (I'm sorry didnt get the users name) was maybe suggesting that users (we are a team of 4) who create any qvd include an "artificial" field which contains document informaiton. Isnt there a function that returns document level information? I dont know but like I said its starting to make the wheels turn so optimizim is starting to be creep in. Thanks.