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hic
Former Employee
Former Employee

Week numbers are often used in calendars, although not as commonly in some countries as in others. In northern Europe, it is very common to refer to a week by its number, but in many other countries it is not used at all. Just as with the week start, week numbers are defined differently depending on country, so you may need to add code in QlikView to generate your own week numbers.

 

So, how do you count the weeks? Is Jan 1st always part of week one? Not necessarily.

 

If week 53 starts as late as Dec 28th, does Jan 1st also belong to week 53? Sometimes, yes.

 

There is a definition made by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 8601) that QlikView uses to calculate week numbers. It states that

  1. The week starts on a Monday.
  2. A week is always unbroken.
    I.e. some years week 1 starts already in December, and in other years week 52 or 53 continues into January.
  3. Week 1 always contains Jan 4th.
    Or, differently put: Week 1 always has at least 4 days in January. A third way to say the same thing is: The first Thursday of the year always lies in week 1.

 

These three bullets define the three parameters you need to define general week numbers:

 

     Set vCal_FD = 0; // First Day of the week {0=Mon, 1=Tue, ... , 6=Sun}
     Set vCal_BW = 0; // Broken Weeks allowed {0=No, 1=Yes}
     Set vCal_RD = 4; // Reference day = This day in Jan defines week one {1..7}

 

How the week start - the first parameter - influences the week number can be seen in the following table. It shows how the week number would change for the days around New Year 2013 if different week starts are used. The other parameters are kept constant.

 

Table x04.png

 

The second parameter concerns whether or not broken weeks should be used. If they are, a new week number will always be used on Jan 1st, and as a consequence the first and last weeks of the year can have less than 7 days.

 

Table 6x4.png

 

And finally, the third parameter, the reference day. It defines which day that always belongs to week 1. In the table below, the reference day is 4; hence Jan 4th always belongs to week 1, which can be clearly seen. This number also defines the minimal number of days of week 1 that fall in the new year.

 

Table 604.png

 

The ISO standard is thus a 0/0/4 week numbering. In countries where Sunday is used as first day of the week, I have seen several different variants: 6/1/1, 6/0/3 and 6/0/4.

 

If you copy the above parameters to your QlikView script and the following lines to your Master Calendar definition, you can redefine the week numbers any way you want:

 

     Load *,
          Div( Date - WeekStart( WeekYearRefDate, 0, $(vCal_FD) ) + 7, 7 ) as WeekNumber,
          Year( WeekYearRefDate ) as WeekYear;
     Load *,
          Date( YearStart( If( $(vCal_BW), Date, WeekRefDate )) + $(vCal_RD) - 1) as WeekYearRefDate ;
     Load *,
          Date( WeekStart( Date, 1, $(vCal_FD) ) - $(vCal_RD) ) as WeekRefDate ;

 

The fields WeekYearRefDate (Jan 4th in the ISO definition) and WeekRefDate (the Thursday of the week in the ISO definition) are really not necessary, but the expressions become somewhat simpler if these are used.

 

Until we get a general week numbering functionality built into the QlikView standard functions (and, yes, we are looking into this) you will have to redefine the week numbers using the above script. Good luck!

 

HIC

 

Further reading related to this topic:

Ancient Gods and Modern Days

Redefining the Week Start

Redefining the Week Start in Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense – Date & Time

43 Comments
michael_solomon
Partner - Contributor III
Partner - Contributor III

Great post. Thanks.

I take it this would also work if you wanted the Fiscal Week No where the fiscal year does not start in January, and that you could either pass a modified date instead of the Date field Eg AddMonths(Date, 6), or you could use the 3rd parameter in the YearStart function to set the 1st month of the year.

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Not applicable

Some of the functions have to be tweaked a bit when working with week # because of the overlap in months, quarters and years but I find that using these dimensions is so important in period over period comparative analysis.. It has been awhile since I worked on these apps.

Debbie Pyykkonen

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Colin-Albert

Having weeks months and calendar years on the same chart (or even sheet) can be a recipe for confusion. I would keep charts that use weeks and WeekYear separate from charts using months and calendar years.

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I agree with the weeks in months but QOQ and YOY the discrepancies are minimal.

many companies want to compare their data YOY or QOQ on a weekly basis. the only way to do this is with #’s not dates. I agree, months is taking it too far, move to Days at the month level but Quarters and Years work very well especially for sales analytics for those businesses that run on a quarterly/annual quota.. It really helps to drive the sales managers to push to meet their quota when they look at this analysis. we used it religiously to fine tune forecasting because all of our sales team was held accountable for forecasting accuracy. when they see how their sales trend on a weekly basis QOQ, they start to forecast better.

QlikCommunity

Redefining the Week Numbers

new comment by Colin Albert - View all comments on this blog post

Having weeks months and calendar years on the same chart (or even sheet) can be a recipe for confusion. I would keep charts that use weeks and WeekYear separate from charts using months and calendar years.

Reply to this email to respond to Colin Albert's comment.

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hic
Former Employee
Former Employee

Michael Solomon : I wouldn't pass a modified date, because it would not be maintainable code (although I think you're right that it would work). I am right now investigating different ways of shifting the week-year and I am sketching on a third blog post in this series; one about financial years. It won't be for next week, but sometime later.

However I can already now say that if you want to shift the year a specific number of days, you can set the third parameter, the vCal_RD to any integer value: E.g. if you set it to -1, then Dec 30 will always be in week one.

HIC

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Sajid_Mahmood
Creator
Creator

Great logic for finding the week nos.

Regards

SM

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Not applicable

Thank u ! Very useful Post.

Regards,

Divya

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kalyandg
Partner - Creator III
Partner - Creator III

Hi HIC,

Thanks for providing such a idea, really very nice post.

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Not applicable

Hi Henric,

This is a very nice post!

I have a question related to this topic: How would you manage to change the month of the week?.

Imagine a week that is part of 2 months. in my requirements, this week should be taken into account for the month for which the week has more days in.

i.e.:    Mon 30/01/2013   in Qlikview: Year = 2013 Month = 12 Week = 1

          Tue  31/01/2013

          Wed 01/01/2014  in QlikView: Year = 2014 Mnth = 1 Week = 1

          Thu 02/01/2014

          Fri 03/01/2014

          Sat 04/01/2014

          Sun 05/01/2014

So, last days of 2013 should be part of january 2014 .

Inside a same year, I can manage it but I still have the probleme for the last/first week of the year .

Your help would be great !

Thanks

CaroM.

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hic
Former Employee
Former Employee

If you want the entire week to belong to the month in which the week has 4 or more days, you could easily calculate the month from the 4th day of the week. I.e.

Month(WeekStart(Date)+3) as WeekMonth,

Date(MonthStart(WeekStart(Date)+3),'YYYY-MM') as RWeekMonth,

HIC

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