Dropbox Connectivity is Live in Qlik Sense Cloud

[Anonymous]

Happy New Year! We’re excited (and hope you are, also) to ring in 2018 with the much-anticipated Dropbox connector now live in Qlik Sense Cloud Business. Our newest connector gives Qlik Sense Cloud Business users more variety and flexibility in how and where they store and refresh data.

Some how-to’s:

• Access the connector via the data manager or data load editor. Note that within the data load editor, it falls under “Web Storage Provider.”
• Authenticate like many of the other connectors, using token authentication. If you are already signed in to your Dropbox account when you authenticate, this process will be even easier.

And some highlights:

• After you authenticate, you will be able to view the folder and file structure you have set up in your Dropbox account and sort by file type.
• You can create apps directly from data files, including QVDs, that remain stored in or linked to your Dropbox account – you no longer have to attach or upload those files.
• You can upload and update files manually to Dropbox or set up an automated data file upload when data is added or changed. Then use Qlik Sense Cloud Business’s scheduled data refresh to update any app using that data (see Mike Tarallo’s video on how to do this here). These steps automate and streamline the entire data update process.

Ready to get started? Use the attached sample data file to test out connectivity with your Dropbox account.

Additional Connectivity

If you missed our November blog post (which you easily may have, because it was accidentally posted to the wrong location), scroll down and read about Amazon RedShift.

For our marketing users in particular, we have two new web connectors for sentiment analysis tools – Repustate and Sentiment140. Now you can have more of your social analytics data in one place, and take a deeper dive into text and content analysis.

Coming Soon

Last year was busy as we grew our Qlik Sense Cloud Business community, continuously added new features, and listened to all of your valuable feedback. With that feedback in mind, this year we plan to broaden the capabilities and options in Qlik Sense Cloud to support more use cases and help you find insights faster. Our focus on connectivity will continue, particularly around on-premises connectivity. We’re also working on a wide variety of usability enhancements, new feature additions, and onboarding support and resources - plus the February release features - that we look forward to showing you soon!

[YoussefBelloum]

Good . it's not planned for the free cloud version ?

[Josh_Good]

Hi Youssef,

For Qlik Sense Cloud Basic (aka the free version), user can upload files manually and combine them to create Qlik Sense apps.  Qlik Sense Cloud Business has the growing set of connectors to cloud and on-premises sources.  So you are correct, DropBox connector will only appear in Qlik Sense Cloud Business.

-Josh

Qlik

[YoussefBelloum]

Thank you

[gra]

Hi Youssef,

More information about the DropBox connector is also available in the Help here:

Dropbox ‒ Qlik Connectors

Hope this helps.

-Greg

Qlik

[YoussefBelloum]

Hi Greg, Thank you !

[stevedark]

I've just been trying out the DropBox functionality in Qlik Sense Cloud For Business, this seems to work well for loading data.  The STORE statement doesn't seem to work however.

From what I can see in the Cloud, you can now STORE into AttachedFiles (which I don't think you could do last time I checked), but trying to STORE into Data files or Dropbox will fail.

This is a step forward for incremental load, but it still means that you can't implement best practice, of having a separate set of QVD generators to your presentation apps.

Is there any intention of allowing the STORE function to work with DropBox, or is this something we will need to continue to work around?  Or am I just missing something in how it is configured?

Many thanks for any insights you can give.

Steve

[ply]

Hi Steve,

You are correct that the Dropbox connector does not support writing today and is not meant to support the incremental load use case. We are separately looking into incremental loads in Qlik Sense Cloud for Business in future updates.

Hope this helps

-Peter

Qlik

[stevedark]

Thanks for your response Peter.  It's good that you can do it with AttachedFiles now, but it does mean that ETL and Presentation have to be done in a single document.

Please update when you can advise how you recommend a shared ETL/Data tier can be implemented.

[ply]

Hi Steve,

Just to be clear - currently, the Attached Files folder is only designed and supported to read QVD files.  I realize that some users are also using this feature to write files, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this.  It is unsupported and will not always work correctly.  As I mentioned, we are currently working on developing a solution for writing files in this situation

-Peter

Qlik

[stevedark]

Understood.  I guess that there is a chance it will go back to the state where it raises an error when you try to use it?