topic Dinamic Chart: is it useful? in QlikView

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:45:34 GMT

Gives a possibilities to select Dimensions and Expressions for a chart. How often we fight with clients to reduce number of columns in a table. This is the solution. What do you think is it useful?

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:09:19 GMT

It's useful. I've had something similar in a production application for a couple years now, and have had users specifically ask for this feature in some newer applications. In my case, I define the expressions in the chart and just enable and disable them rather than adding and removing them. I believe I found that was faster than adding and removing, but it's been a long time since I've done any testing on those applications. For comparison, I've attached the template for what I do.

I think we both share a possible weakness - I believe that the server only keeps one copy of the chart, so if you have multiple users doing dynamic reporting at the same time, I think it can cause problems. However, it hasn't been a problem for us in practice, and apparently hasn't been for you either.

(Edit: Our intended solution to the "only one chart" problem was to create a hidden master template for the chart with all dimensions and columns, and then clone from there, and remove everything we didn't need, then allow it to calculate and be displayed. Everyone would then have a different chart, so there wouldn't be conflicts. We never implemented this since we haven't had problems in practice for a long long time.)

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:37:34 GMT

Hmmm, your macro is crashing out for me in both 8.5 and 9.0. It happens when we try to add the dimensions.

'add dimensions
set dimSelection = ActiveDocument.fields("%Dimension").GetSelectedValues
for i=0 to dimSelection.Count - 1
chart.AddDimension dimSelection.Item(i).Text <-- stops here with no error message
next

I remember having and then solving this exact same problem with my own macro when we upgraded to 8.5. However, I'm not seeing anything different in mine. I basically have the exact same loop as you:

for j = 0 to selectedDimensionMax 'add selected dimensions
chart.addDimension selectedDimensions.Item(j).Text
next

I can't remember how I fixed the problem. I remember that the issue was intermittent. I think Rob Wunderlich figured it out and fixed the macro for me. But now I'm not seeing any indication of what he did in my code comments.

HAH! I just crashed mine out the same as yours in 9.0 (we're still officially on 8.5). Guess we'll have to solve the problem again when we upgrade.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:46:29 GMT


John Witherspoon wrote:
Hmmm, your macro is crashing out for me in both 8.5 and 9.0. It happens when we try to add the dimensions.

I've done it in 9.00.7320.7 SR2. And it works fine there. But I've decided to test on web server for multisession. The server version is 8.5. And I have the same problem. I'm trying to work it out.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:57:06 GMT

OK, I'm on the initial release of 9.0 since it's just the personal edition. I haven't bothered upgrading to SR2. That's probably a good sign that yours works in 9.0 SR2. Maybe I won't have to make changes to mine to get it up and running again. Let me check my old email. I'm betting that Rob explained what he did in email. Yes, here we are:


John,
If I understand the problem fully, I believe I have a workaround for #1. I did my testing on the DynamicReportTemplate.qvw and didn't test yet with your real apps. I was testing with 8.50.6231and can reproduce the problem.
The problem is that AddDimension throws the error when it's called on a hidden chart. I put an app in $Developer\bug\addDimension.qvw that demonstrates this.
I've created $Developer\$template\DynamicReportTemplate2.qvw as a suggested workaround.
For the hidden chart CH01, I removed the "and AllowCalculation=1" from the Show Condition. I also changed the field test from
 "=not isNull(getFieldSelections([Expressions]))"
to
 "=GetSelectedCount([Expressions]) > 0"
This last change is not related to the bug but with all the recent forum buzz about isNull() I find it to be a clearer expression.
This causes the chart to become visible as soon as selections are made -- which works around the AddDimension limitation (bug?). To achieve the visual effect of showing the "Please wait..." text object (TX07) while the chart is calculating, I made the TX07 object as big as the chart, background same as sheet color, no transparency and layer 99 to make sure it's on top. When it displays it completely obscures the chart beneath it.
TX07 visibility is still controlled by the AllowCalculation variable. To smooth out the visual transitions I moved the WaitForIdle to after the setting of AllowCalculation.
BTW, I changed the TableBox TB01 Show Condition to:
=getSelectedCount([Expressions]) = 0 and getSelectedCount([Dimensions]) > 0
just for consistency with the other Show condition change.
Let me know if you think these changes will work with your real apps or if you want me to do some further testing with your other apps.

Unfortunately, even though the symptom appears identical, it doesn't look like the solution will be identical. Your chart is never hidden as best I can tell, so that isn't the problem. Sorry!

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:09:53 GMT


John Witherspoon wrote:Unfortunately, even though the symptom appears identical, it doesn't look like the solution will be identical. Your chart is never hidden as best I can tell, so that isn't the problem. Sorry!

Thank you for efforts. But you was right, the problem is related with another thing.

I've just assigned another copy of the app. This dynamic guy doesn't like to be empty. Even one dimension or expression should be there. What did I do?

I removed all dimensions and expressions, and after that I populated it by new sets. In current version it cares about dimensions and expressions sequentially - remove old dimensions, add new ones, remove old expressions, add new ones.

Now it works.

Returning to comparison of advantages of your and my approaches. There is one more in my approach - you can change business purpose of the chart by adding or removing dimensions/expressions.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:30:50 GMT

Yay! Yours is now working on my machine in both 8.5 and 9.0. Now I can dig in and see what you're doing and how you're doing it, and how the two approaches are similar and different. I DO remember wanting to add expressions in the macro, not just enable them, but it's been so long I can't remember why. I wasn't able to solve it at the time, and you obviously have.

I don't understand what you mean by changing the business purpose of the chart, or if I do understand, then mine does it too. I add and remove dimensions, and hide and unhide expressions. If I understand yours, you add and remove dimensions AND expressions. From the standpoint of what the user sees, it seems like it would look identical. But I could easily have missed something since I've barely started poking at yours. I'll probably do that Monday unless some emergency comes up.

Thanks for posting this!

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

rwunderlich — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:34:09 GMT

I'll chime in since my name appeared in this thread.

I have used dynamic charts occasionally, but I tend to avoid them for several reasons.

1. I think they may miss an opportunity to create meaningful charts. The "here's your data, make a chart approach" misses for me. The potential to create invalid charts easily exists. I realize there are exceptions and reasonable disagreements with this position.

2. Prior to V9, almost all solutions required using relatively complex macros, usually in unsupported ways (like changing object properties when executing in Server). These macros can be slow, expensive to maintain and buggy.

3. In many cases, I think Server Collaboration objects are a better approach for "ad hoc" stuff. It takes a bit more training to get users working his way but you get broader capabilities (and admittedly possible garbage charts) Or an experienced user can create them on demand and the user can reuse them.

WIth V9, you can now conditionally show columns in a Straight table. If I was creating a dynamic chart in V9, I would take John's approach of predefining the Dimensions and Expressions, control display with conditionals and scrap the whole macro business. I wonder if someone has an example of this they could share?

-Rob

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:45:48 GMT

Obviously I don't have an example of that, but perhaps I should build one. I need to download the latest version of 9.0 and start getting familiar with it anyway. Replacing my ancient macro code with something more robust would give me a good excuse.

Since the conditional columns would depend simply on selections, and since selections are independent for each user, this would also seem to solve the "everyone modifying the same chart" problem that the macro approaches seem to have.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:27:11 GMT

Perhaps this small example is what you asked for ?

I know that in this thread, The MASTERS of Qlikview are all here, Rob, John, orka, and perhaps (surely) Paul.

I am new but i follow all thread and this solution comes to me from a thread in this forum.

http://www.takoo.sn/tij/DynamicReportLEMien.qvw

I've put this link because the upload functionnality of the forum does'nt seem to work.

Thanks for the forum.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:16:50 GMT


Rob Wunderlich wrote:
1. I think they may miss an opportunity to create meaningful charts. The "here's your data, make a chart approach" misses for me. The potential to create invalid charts easily exists. I realize there are exceptions and reasonable disagreements with this position.

I'm absolutely agree with you. Such functionality should be provided for advanced users and specific tasks only.


Rob Wunderlich wrote:
2. Prior to V9, almost all solutions required using relatively complex macros, usually in unsupported ways (like changing object properties when executing in Server). These macros can be slow, expensive to maintain and buggy.
3. In many cases, I think Server Collaboration objects are a better approach for "ad hoc" stuff. It takes a bit more training to get users working his way but you get broader capabilities (and admittedly possible garbage charts) Or an experienced user can create them on demand and the user can reuse them.
WIth V9, you can now conditionally show columns in a Straight table. If I was creating a dynamic chart in V9, I would take John's approach of predefining the Dimensions and Expressions, control display with conditionals and scrap the whole macro business. I wonder if someone has an example of this they could share?<div></div>

In these cases I'm agree with you as well. The simpler the better. It's very good that you and me on our PCs can use the latest versions. But reality is that some clients are still using 8.5 server. And my current does. The example was made for its purposes and it works for 9.0 as well.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:24:39 GMT


orka wrote:
<pre>
Rob Wunderlich wrote:
1. I think they may miss an opportunity to create meaningful charts. The "here's your data, make a chart approach" misses for me. The potential to create invalid charts easily exists. I realize there are exceptions and reasonable disagreements with this position.

I'm absolutely agree with you. Such functionality should be provided for advanced users and specific tasks only.

I now agree as well, though I didn't always.

When I first introduced dynamic reporting at our shop, I had several reasons:

My core users were coming from an older system that used almost this exact form of dynamic reporting.
After literally almost a year of meetings, my users had finally agreed on how to CALCULATE the data. But try as I might, I couldn't get anyone to even DISCUSS how to display the data.
I was very experienced at using dynamic reporting to answer any questions my users might present, and wanted to keep this capability.

So rather that build charts for them, I simply gave them the ability to create their own charts on the fly. About half a year after the system went live, ONE user finally did give me a handful of reports that he wanted to see. Despite prodding, no one else ever did.

But after a couple years of the system being live, I'm fairly confident that almost no one is creating dynamic charts, and confident that no one is doing it on a regular basis. Yet the only non-dynamic charts were designed for ONE user, so I can't imagine that they are serving everyone's needs. Use of the system is very low.

I DO think that we missed "an opportunity to create meaningful charts." I did my best to pull this information out of my users, and failed. Also, at the time, I was fairly poor at interface design and the display of information - I come from more of a "back end" background, designing and coding core routines that users never see.

What the project needed, I think, was someone much better at pulling information out of the users, and someone much better at interface design and the display of information. Had we had that, we probably would have started with a suite of charts and dashboards designed to serve the core needs of the users. To that, we might well have added dynamic reporting for advanced users who wanted custom analytics. But it should have been a SECONDARY way of visualizing the data, not the PRIMARY way.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:47:28 GMT

Here's a simple non-macro V9 straight-table conditional column hide/show sample, shared with me by one of my colleagues.

Tom

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:11:54 GMT


Rob Wunderlich wrote: WIth V9, you can now conditionally show columns in a Straight table. If I was creating a dynamic chart in V9, I would take John's approach of predefining the Dimensions and Expressions, control display with conditionals and scrap the whole macro business. I wonder if someone has an example of this they could share?

Well, it looks like this won't work for me. I ran into two fairly fundamental problems:

Data is still broken down by all the dimensions you are hiding.
Does not work with any chart type other than straight tables.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:58:40 GMT

Sometimes it's not possible to pull out any requirements from a client at all. All what you need it's just providing for them a possibility to play with data on first iterations. And by doing this they will start formalize what do they really want in their heads.

This is exactly my case. Customers call to support and ask some questions. We do analysis of the questions and for more often asked ones we dodashboards. And as a part of dashboards for key users, we provide the dynamic charts where they purify their requirements for growing appetite. 🙂

And now we are on another side, when customer comes to us with requirements instead of pulling out this info from them.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:04:58 GMT


John Witherspoon wrote:
Well, it looks like this won't work for me. I ran into two fairly fundamental problems:<ol><li><div>Data is still broken down by all the dimensions you are hiding. </div></li><li><div>Does not work with any chart type other than straight tables. </div></li></ol>

This exactly what I meant when I wrote that you can change a business purpose of the chart. By selecting different dimensions you can brake down data in different ways but you still have a possibility to apply some expressions for another view of chart.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

johnw — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:13:43 GMT


orka wrote:
<pre>
John Witherspoon wrote:
Well, it looks like this won't work for me. I ran into two fairly fundamental problems:<ol><li><div>Data is still broken down by all the dimensions you are hiding. </div></li><li><div>Does not work with any chart type other than straight tables. </div></li></ol>

After a more careful look, it does seem that both of our approaches accomplish the same thing. Both of our approaches can add and remove both dimensions and expressions. Both of our approaches therefore allow us to change the business purpose of the chart. Our dimension logic does the exact same thing. Our expression logic is different, in that I'm disabling and enabling while you're removing and adding. They seem functionally identical to me from a user perspective.

Close, anyway. Since mine uses the same expression and just enables and disables, if a user removes the expression and then adds it back, it will preserve their formatting and sorting. Since I'm adding and removing dimensions, though, it doesn't preserve formatting and sorting of dimensions, so mine isn't consistent in that regard.

I also display a table box when no expressions are selected, but it would probably be trivial to add a hidden expression to your chart when only dimensions are selected. For that matter, I should probably change mine to work that way. I bet the code would be simpler. Yep, the code is simpler - I just have a Default expression that is hidden/invisible depending on the type of chart and that I never disable. Slight problem when switching to chart types that don't allow hidden or invisible expressions, in which case it displays zeros, but that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. It seems worth the simplified macro code.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Fri, 14 May 2010 08:00:08 GMT

Hello Friends,

We are using QV v9. But when i post this qvw in server and try to check the functionality of dynamic chart, it didn't work.

Do i need to change any option in the report or in the server ?

Also i have tried John Witherspoon's Example "DynamicReportTemplate v9", it worked fine in AccessPoint.

Could you please help me.

Regards,

R.Srinivasan.

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:07:12 GMT

R.Srinivasan,

When you said you tested it in AccessPoint - did you have mulitple users testing the app and dynamic chart at the same time? The thread earlier indicated this might be a problem.

matt

Dinamic Chart: is it useful?

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:36:47 GMT

Good evening,

Sorry but I enjoy the topic with a question:

I am 15 and as I leave three expressions always visible?

Everything else is working fine.

Hugs

Gledson