Kick-Start Your Qlik Application Automations with Automation Templates

[QlikProductUpdates]

Every analytics developer craves time-saving efficiencies and while visual solutions like Qlik Application Automation are a productivity boon there’s always more that can be done. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the introduction of Qlik Application Automation Templates.

[QlikProductUpdates]

What are Automation Templates ?

Templates are a brand-new enhancement to Qlik Application Automation that provides a library of pre-built workflows to accelerate the development and deployment of automations. These templates expedite your automation journey by providing short-cuts to common automation use-cases such as Reload Task Chaining, Loop and Reduce, Alerts and Notifications, and even the automatic creation of a ServiceNow ticket in the event a reload or business process fails. Templates are completely customizable and provide developers best practices built right into the automation, decreasing any mistakes, and simplifying the development lifecycle. We are excited to announce 18 Qlik-curated and managed templates for our first rollout.

What is Application Automation?

If you missed the announcement, we launched Application Automation, a no-code, drag-and-drop development tool that helps you assemble dynamic workflows to drive automation, optimize processes, and integrate applications across your SaaS ecosystem. Qlik Application Automation provides the ability to automate dynamic workflows that empowers the analytics to trigger action. Qlik Application Automation connects with a variety of enterprise applications like Snowflake, Salesforce, Splunk, and Service now supporting use cases like Analytics Dev-Ops to the more advanced integrations across multiple connectors.

Visit our Knowledge Base to dive deeper with ‘How to Articles’ using Qlik Application Automation or watch the YouTube playlist here.

Getting started with Automation Templates and automations

The template picker automatically pops up from within Qlik Cloud when you start building new  automations. You can then configure and modify the template to suit your needs. There are five categories of templates (Analytics Data Pipelines, Alerting, Master Item Management, Change Control, and App to App Integration) covering a variety of use cases such as Task Chaining, Loop and Reduce, and others.

Each Template has a detailed page that provides a summary of the Template, snapshot of the automation workflow, and information such as the type of connectors used within the selected Template.

For the first release, we will deliver 18 Templates around the following categories:

• Analytics Data Pipelines - Easily reload applications, couple task chains together, and create Service Now tickets for failed reloads.
• Alerting - Develop advanced alerts and distribute them through Slack or Microsoft Teams.
• Master Item Management - Send measures from a parent app to other apps in a targeted space. 
• Change Control –Automate changes from apps and schedule import/export of Qlik Sense applications back and forth from file services like Amazon S3.
• App to App Integration – Build autonomous integrations across non-Qlik applications to perform tasks like syncing contacts from Salesforce to HubSpot or sending emails with attachments to Dropbox. 

Summary

Before Qlik Application Automation, it required users to find the outlier and then alert someone, submit a ticket, or whichever subsequent processes needed execution. Qlik Application Automation solves that and initiates the next evolution from passive BI to Active Intelligence. Using Templates to accelerate the build and deployment of sophisticated autonomous workflows, customers can now think big and solve systemic problems. Through the power of Qlik Cloud, Qlik Application Automation ensures data and analytics are the launch pad for autonomous business processes across your SaaS ecosystem. This is the first release of Templates, so stay tuned as we continue to innovate and enhance Qlik Application Automation.

For all product release details, subscribe to our SaaS Change Log.

[JordyWegman]

Hi guys,

Thanks for this update. I think I see a mistake in the 'Get Measure' block that is used in the Master Item Management template.

When you get the measure data the qLabelExpression is not getting the label, it's getting the qLabel.

Check QAA:

Now I get that the application updates the target application, but I also seems to work backwards to the original application where it overrides the Label Expression with the Label.

Also, it seems like when I do two changes, it needs to run for every change and it doesn't capture all changes at once.

So to summarize I have three issues:

1. Label Expression is not picked up in Get Measure
2. Source application is updated while it should only update the target application
3. The app needs to run multiple times to get all changes

Could someone give some feedback on this?

Jordy

Climber

[Emile_Koslowski]

Hi Jordy,

Thanks for the feedback, please find my replies below:

1. This works fine for me. Did you edit the label in the UI right before getting the measure in the automation? Automations use different sessions than the Qlik Sense UI. Each automation will use a unique session per app per run. It can take up to 30 minutes for changes to sync between sessions.
   
   
2. This means the source app is in the output of the List Apps block, I'll update the KB article. You can prevent this by:
   1. adding a space id to the List Apps block and making sure the source app is not in the same space as the target apps. 
   2. adding a Condition block right before the Create Or Update Measure block, this validates the app id from every app in the List Apps block's output to make sure it isn't executed for the source app.
      
      
3. This is related to the multiple sessions synchronization issues from the first question. We are currently investigating this.

Kind regards,
Emile

[JordyWegman]

Hi Emile,

Thanks for your response.

1. I think this doesn't have to do anything with a timing difference. It's literally the wrong field that is taken as you can see in my screenshot. This is because I differentiated the field by naming one label and the other name. Therefore you can see a wrong input is taken. In my test this morning I waited 17 minutes and it still went wrong with a new measure, but also my old ones from weeks ago are still going wrong.
2. Thanks, this is a good tip and also make sense now I think about it.
3. Good to know about this issue. I guess a new ticket is not needed.

Jordy,
Climber

[JordyWegman]

Hi @Emile_Koslowski ,

Is there any update on the 'wrong' field? Because we're waiting on this fix in order to implement this at customers. But as long as the field is not set correctly I'm unable to do so. Maybe if there is another workaround that would be fine.

Thanks,

Jordy
Climber

[Emile_Koslowski]

Hi @JordyWegman ,

I think the issue isn't the Get Measure block but how the template is configured.

If you look a the Create Or Update Measure block, the input field 'Label Expression' is mapped to qLabel. I think this should be mapped to qLabelExpression.

I'll log this with our team for update.

Kind regards,
Emile

[Emile_Koslowski]

Hi,

We released a new version of the template today that contains the updated field mapping.

Let me know if this solves the issue.

Kind regards,
Emile

[JordyWegman]

Hi Emile,

Thanks for coming back to me on this. But I just tested my application and it still seems to overwrite the label field with the name field. See my screenshot where we see the outcome of the block:

Here you can see that qLabelExpression is again renamed while I called it Expression1 Label.

Could we maybe schedule a call on this? It's probably faster and we can see if I'm not doing anything wrong here.

Jordy

Climber

[Emile_Koslowski]

Yes, I'll send you an invite.

Just to be sure, did you re-install the template? We can't overwrite an installed template when we release a new version (otherwise we could overwrite changes).

Emile 

[JordyWegman]

Hi Emile,

That makes sense, let me also test that!

Jordy

Climber

[JordyWegman]

Hi Emile,

Sadly it's still going wrong as you can see in the screenshot. I've copied a new template and used that one.

Jordy

Climber