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Michael_Tarallo
Employee
Employee


drop.pngGood day Qlik Community! In this article / video - I'm excited to present to you a preview of the new Dropbox connector that comes with Qlik Sense Cloud Business and Qlik Sense Enterprise, available later this month. In short, Qlik Sense can now securely access Dropbox and pull data from Qlik Sense supported file sources, directly from the cloud share. The connector itself, is fairly simple to use. It's just like accessing a local folder structure. However, it gives you another option for storing data files for use with your Qlik Sense apps. It even opens some new techniques for refreshing file-based used by those apps. So, instead of storing data files in my Qlik Sense Cloud Workspace, I can choose to store them in Dropbox. With this approach I can automate a data file upload process when new data arrives..... add that to Qlik Sense Cloud Business and its Schedule Data Refresh capability, and you can completely automate the data upload and Qlik Sense app refresh process!

Want to learn more? Take a look at this brief video below to see how I used the Qlik Sense Dropbox connector and common, freely available Windows tools to make this happen.

NOTE: The approach I take in the video simulates data being written out / updated to disk and then transferred to Dropbox on an automated schedule using a 3rd party scheduler (Windows Task Scheduler). It is completely up to you how you would like to achieve this. For example, you could have a database process export files directly to the Dropbox folder, or even use an ETL tool workflow and its scheduler to write out data to the Dropbox share.

Have more ideas on how this can be achieved? We want to hear from you, so share them in the comments below.

Regards,

Michael Tarallo (@mtarallo) | Twitter

Qlik

Qlik Sense Cloud Business - Dropbox Connector - Refreshing file-based data

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12 Comments
Michael_Tarallo
Employee
Employee

Hi Ernesto - I'm pleased to inform you that I have been given a work-around from our dev team - this only works in Qlik Sense Cloud Business.

Workaround to be able to load, in cloud, multiple files from a connected Dropbox folder.

Procedure:

  • Open/Create App in Qlik Cloud Business and go to the DLE. (data load editor)
  • Create connection to the Dropbox _Metadata_ connector - it allows you to load the list of files (Table1)
  • Select any of these files from Dropbox connector (Table2)
  • Create a loop to go through the list of files from the Table1 and replace the filename in the Table2 script by the loop variable (that contains filename)

Sample script load script:

//TABLE1

LIB CONNECT TO 'Dropbox_Metadata';

LOAD path_lower as [List.path_lower];

SELECT 

path_lower

FROM List

WITH PROPERTIES (

dropboxFolder='/', recursive='false', includeMediaInfo='false', includeDeleted='false');

LET noRows = NoOfRows('List');

// for i=0 to $(noRows)-1 /

/ loop through every row

for i=0 to 2 

let vFilePath = peek('List.path_lower', $(i), 'List');  

//TABLE2 

LIB CONNECT TO 'Dropbox'; 

LOAD

name,     

surname,     

"group",     

"date",     

"test/read",     

"test/error",     

"test/pravotv",     

"test/time",     

"test/timerest",     

"test/quality",    

"test/tochn",     

"test/efectd" 

FROM [lib://Dropbox$(vFilePath)]  (XmlSimple, table is Result);

next

*please note that you need to create 2 connections - one for `dropbox` (storage) and one for the `dropbox metadata` also keep in mind that it works for the same structured files

*important: Dropbox metadata is available on *Cloud only* as built-in connector.

For Desktop/Enterprise you need to install QWC standalone ( Connectors-> Qlik Web connectors)

let me know how you do

Mike

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evizcayaretail
Partner - Contributor II
Partner - Contributor II

Hi Mike, thanks for your fast and complete response,

I'll check.

regards,

0 Likes
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