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Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

mmarchese — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:56:29 GMT

Line charts have 3 options for how to handle missing values:

Show as connections
Show as zeros
Show as gaps

But this feature is limited and unintuitive, leading to periodic forum posts over the years (such as my own) from bewildered Qlik app creators. In this article, Qlik acknowledges this feature's problems to some extent but states that it's "impossible" to fix because there's no way to know which points are missing.

Well, I reject that response. Why? Because it's plainly not impossible. A line chart requires exactly one dimension to be provided for the horizontal axis, and that field contains all the missing points. Maybe the algorithm to extract those missing points from that field wouldn't fit nicely into the Qlik engine, but that's very different from impossible.

Example:

SET DateFormat = 'yyyy-mm-dd'; Fact_Revenue: LOAD [Date], Revenue INLINE [ Date, Revenue 2020-01-01, 100 2020-01-03, 200 ]; Dim_Calendar: LOAD [Date] INLINE [ Date 2020-01-01 2020-01-02 2020-01-03 ];

I create a line chart and choose "Show as gaps."

With no dates filtered out, Sum(Revenue) is shown as 0 for 2020-01-02 if no filtering is applied. This is a borderline case. I'm personally ok with it because Sum(no data) = 0 and because I happen to want to see a zero in this case, but I could see the argument that it's wrong since it's ignoring the "Show as gaps" choice.

When I filter out 2020-01-02, the corresponding data point vanishes and I am left with a connection across it instead of a gap as I had chosen. This case is clear-cut: it's definitely wrong. And the answer to the question of "Which points are missing?" is obvious from looking at the Date field.

Since the missing values dropdown has already been a part of Qlik's app editing interface for many years, effort should be put into getting trivial cases like this to work as users expect.

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values - Status changed to: Open - Collecting Feedback

Patric_Nordstrom — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 15:13:02 GMT

Thank you for your feedback on ways to improve our product. While this is something we understand would be useful, it's not on the short-term roadmap. Please continue to show your support for this idea.

Thanks,
Patric

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

HolgerV — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 09:37:36 GMT

We are relatively new to Qlik and struggle with the exact issue on our first project:

Our continous time axis uses 5 Minute intervalls. We don't manage to remove the lines representing wrong data points. And we can't activate data points or labels to clearify the issue as this would blow up the visualization if we zoom out to the whole day.

P.S. : We have tried "include zero-values", adding a fake line with 0 or null data and playing with the "Show as"-Options available. Still looking for a solution.

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

giraffes_heart — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 14:03:06 GMT

Same issue here - neither unchecking the box "include 0 values" in data handling section or switching between the 3 "missing values" options in Appearance section makes any difference. Also tried different types of x axes, continuous or not, or converted 0 values into null() or text - my final line chart looks same.

I wish this gets solved soon, as it is quite major issue visually for effectively understanding the data viz.

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

Kyle1 — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 20:37:51 GMT

This is also a large issue that our organization is facing for our visuals. It makes the context of the visual entirely inaccurate.

Please prioritize this and recognize the concern here.

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

Jacob_Poole — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 16:20:29 GMT

This has proved problematic in several cases for my team also. Hoping for a solution soon.

Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values

QlikSense_Developer — Wed, 03 May 2023 13:29:39 GMT

This has been a problem in multiple scenarios for our team. Hoping to see a solution come in to play before too long.

From now on, please track this idea from the Ideation por...

Meghann_MacDonald — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 15:31:20 GMT

From now on, please track this idea from the Ideation portal.

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Meghann

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Re: Fix continuous line chart's display of missing values - Status changed to: Closed - Archived

Ideation — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 15:31:22 GMT