topic Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list? in QlikView

Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

petter — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 05:28:25 GMT

Hello community,

I am used to writing set expressions like these:

Sum( { <rDate={1,2,3,4,5}> } Sales )

I would also like to use something like this:

Sum( { <rDate={-1,-2,-3,-4-,-5}> } Sales )

But that doesn't work very well. From all my tests I can only conclude that listing numbers will only work with positive numbers. As soon as I involve negative numbers the numbers has to be quoted like they were strings... which they obviously are not. Is this just a quirk that I have to accept in QlikView or am I missing something here?

This will work:

Sum( { <rDate={'-1','-2','-3','-4','-5'}> } Sales )

It seems a bit like a weird thing not to accept a minus in front of a number and accept it as negative. I can certainly live with it but it seems very clumsy.

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

tresB — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 05:53:30 GMT

Right, it seems QV parser to get confused with the Exclusion Operator '-' and negative symbol '-'.

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

petter — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 05:58:47 GMT

I didn't think of that - you are possible right .

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

petter — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 06:13:24 GMT

But the exclusion operator should come either before the equal sign or before the first curly braces anyway - shouldn't it?

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

marcus_sommer — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:10:55 GMT

For me it looked like a bug then with '-1' ... it queries a string - meant this a negative number and a string with a negative number will return the same result? Or won't the string-case match?

An alternatively which isn't so confusing could be to use a search-function within the set analysis:

Sum( { <rDate={"$(=match(rDate, -1,-2,-3,-4,-5))"}> } Sales )

- Marcus

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

tresB — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:33:49 GMT

Perhaps, single quotes don't essentially cause a string transformation, but find for exact match. Or, may be after converting it to string qv handles the values intelligently; for numeric and strings accordingly. And it is seen that qv is good enough to identify data types and operate, like :

Left('12AA',2)+10 ... works fine without having to convert the string to number.

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

jonathandienst — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:52:04 GMT

I've never had a problem that the set analysis does not correctly handle the (quoted) negative numbers , although I agree that it's odd that you have to quote them.

Re: Why doesn't Set Expressions with modifier accept negative numbers as constants in an element list?

jonathandienst — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:55:12 GMT

As a corollary, it is not necessary to quote strings if they contain no spaces or reserved characters:

Sum{<AField = {SomeValue}>} Amount) -works perfectly (and the syntax checker does not complain)

Sum{<AField = {Some Value}>} Amount) - does not work

Which makes it even more odd that negative numbers should be quoted)

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