"Stealing" the Visualization Bundle to be used on an older release

[Michael_Tarallo]

Hey guys - a few valued Qlik Community members and contributors  ( @millerhm  @juraj_misina  ) brought to my attention an interesting topic after we released the February 2019 release of Qlik Sense.

What if I want those exciting, sexy, awesome, new visualizations I just saw....BUT I am not ready to upgrade to February 2019? 

Since we don't offer the Visualization Bundle as a separate installation package,  I guess you could find them individually in the Qlik Branch Garden - as I originally suggested, but @millerhm pointed out that they wanted the "certified extensions" that were part of the February 2019 release. That's when @juraj_misina made mention of a simple work-around involving "stealing them"  from the February 2019 release of Qlik Sense Desktop. I thought this was a great topic to produce a quick video on to show others whom might not be familiar with how that process might look.

Watch this quick video to see how I "stole" the visualization bundle from the February 2019 release and added it to my Qlik Sense Enterprise November 2018 release.

Thanks @millerhm and @juraj_misina for your contribution!

Note: I cannot attach the .zip file here at this time. It is possible if you have any issues with these extensions while being used with an older release, our support team may ask you to reproduce the issue within the February 2019 release, so please be aware.

Can't see the video? YouTube blocked by your region or organization?

Download the .mp4 to watch on your computer or mobile device.

Thanks,

Mike Tarallo

Qlik

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[juraj_misina]

I restarted the environment with Septemer 2018 patch 1, no issues (Appart from services not starting properly on the first try, but that's another story. Kept me tense for a few minutes though ;))

[jstar]

@Michael_Tarallo Did your team find out, why these extension are deletet after Service restart?

[Michael_Tarallo]

Hi J_star - according to @juraj_misina  whom tested with a previous release and PM they tested this and did not see this behavior. I will inquire on another channel to make sure.

[ChiragPradhan]

Thanks, Michael ! Will all the extensions bundled have compatibility for the same Qlik Sense versions? The reason I ask this is because I downloaded the latest version of the word cloud from the Qlik OSS repository on Github but it did not work with QS Ent. April 2018 Patch 1. I eventually had to download an older version which worked fine.

[Ken_Thomas]

Discussed this with several other internal resources; this is not a configuration that Qlik supports. We got the text description updated on the youtube video description to better reflect this.

You could use this to test out the bundle on a development machine on a slightly older version or something along those lines, but it would not be a configuration that Qlik supports. I am currently working on getting the knowledge article ( 000008137 ) on extension support updated to cover the built-in extension bundles, too. 

-Ken

[juraj_misina]

Thank you Ken for checking. I'd expect this is not supported, it's just "hacking" which might work if you're lucky. One can't really expect new extensions to work 100% with older versions of Qlik Sense. In the end, we should all upgrade to latest releases, anyway. But this allows us to have a sneak peak before updating.

[Mike_Dickson]

So I have been testing importing the bundle package into a Nov 2018 release of Qlik Sense and have been able to reproduce that whenever Qlik Sense services restart, the extension is removed from the QMC and from the Shared Folder where the extension are located.

After some further testing and "hacking" of the .qext file, I was able to get the extension to stay within the environment after restarting services.

This was done by modifying the .qext file and removing the following line:

"installer": QlikExtesnionBundler",

But as Ken mentioned earlier, this is not a supported setup and is only for testing purposes.

[sharishd]

Mike, thanks so much for the info, that was very helpful.

[lblumenfeld]

Michael,

We're going to upgrade from September 2018 to April 2019. We previously, manually installed all the new visualizations in the bundles that were released (which worked fine, btw.) 

When we do the new April 2019 upgrade, can we just reinstall the current bundle as part of the install? Will it refresh/overwrite what's there without any issues?

Thanks.

[rhd]

@Michael_Tarallo ,

@Mike_Dickson .

All you really have to do is simply rename the three install files located at C:\Program Files\Qlik\Sense\ExtensionBundles to change the extensions to something like .old.

Then re-import the bundle.zip files under both the Dashboard-bundle and the Visualization-bundle into the QMC. Restart services to test.

This way you will not be changing any code and causing issues with support for the supported extensions.

Rick