Dynamic data distribution - Offline access to data

[#1]

Dear all,

As of today, I've been requesting all the local resellers of Qlik View here in Mexico in order to develop a solution that will suit for what I need, but none of them gave me a satisfactory answer, so, again, I resort to your help in order to get as usual the best solution!

Here is what I need: I have a master cube that contains all sales information for a country. This cube is being accessed using IE Clients that query a Qlik View server. So far, no problem; but I have several District Managers in a country that must access only to their set of data (no problem if I use dynamic data reduction access-based) but they should do it locally, I mean, they should have local offline versions of their cubes (only with their own set of data) that should be consulted everywhere , even if they don't have access to our network. The information, therefore, should be synchronized every once in a while.

How can I do this? I thought on Publisher, but I guess is not the better choice because it implies to have access to the network in order to query the cubes (or update them).

As usual, again, thanks a lot for all your comments.

[johnw]

I'm not a publisher expert, but it can certainly create copies of the document with the data reduced, and I'm fairly certain it can push these documents wherever you want them to go. So I would think you could push a copy of the document to a district manager's computer, and then access to the document should be local. You would need network access to push the files to your users, but they wouldn't need network access to use them. I think that's how it would work, anyway. I'm not sure that's exactly what you need, though.

[#3]

Hi, thanks for your answer... that's exactly what I need, to push updated cubes to the district managers' computers (or even better, they having a local version of the master cube, data reduced, and updating it in a fairly short process but I don't see how this can be accomplished)... All of My local providers told me that using Publisher the users must be connected all times in order to query their cubes... apparently they were lying...

I will check Publisher documentation further, perhaps I'll find more info

Thanks a lot

[johnw]

I certainly wouldn't accuse anyone of lying. I've been playing with publisher for all of about three weeks now, so as I said, I'm not a publisher expert. I haven't actually used it to put documents anywhere but on the server, and can't say for sure that it can put documents anywhere else. So I could easily be wrong. Even if we're lucky and I'm right, I'm sure your local providers were merely mistaken rather than intentionally misleading you.

I'll poke at it a little and see if I can figure anything out. It'll be trial and error and document reading on my side too, though. Hopefully someone with more knowledge and experience will chime in.

[#5]

John,

Thanks a lot again for your answer. Perhaps you can tell me where can I get the reference manual for Qlik View publisher? I can't find it anywhere on the QV Site...

What you've done by trial and error, is exactly what I want to do 😉

[johnw · Accepted solution]

OK, Publisher can definitely do this.

I was able to use Publisher to push a document to my own PC. I went into Resource Management and added a new distribution resource. I typed in the network address for the folder on my computer as the path. I put myself in as the recipient. I edited the distribution task for the document to add me as a recipient. I ran the distribution task, and it published the document to the directory on my personal computer.

Again, I have no idea what I'm doing in Publisher, and have no idea if this is the right way to handle it. But it DID work, so Publisher is definitely capable of doing what you want it to do, whether or not how I did it is the right way.

As for the documentation, I assume it's in the install directory for Publisher. I'm accessing it via a link on our network. I'm not even sure what computer Publisher is on. Theoretically I have access to it, since I'm technically one of the administrators.

Edit: A drawback of what I'm doing is that even if your users don't need access to the server, I believe they WILL need a licensed copy of QlikView on their machine in order to open the local file. I could be wrong, though.

[rwunderlich]

You can download the Publisher documentation from:
http://www.qlik.com/download/

Click the "Log In" button, sign in with your QlikCommunity userid and then you'll be able to see all the documentation.

As John discussed, using Publisher (Enterprise version may be required) you can publish to a network folder, which could be on the manager's PC. This would be a "Distribution Folder Resource" in Publisher.

You can also do an email distribution (haven't tried this myself).

If you configure the QVS General settings to allow download, you can also allow your users to download documents to their own PC for offline analysis. The license required for the offline analysis can be one of the following:
- A Borrowed CAL (see the QVS ref guide)
- A Professional license
- An "Analyzer Plus" license. I've seen this discussed on the Forum but don't have any experience with it

If you use Pub Enterprise, you can optionaly distribute already reduced documents.

Hope this helps.

-Rob

[#8]

Rob/John,

Thanks a lot for your help, I will test this and if applies for general knowledge will return to this post with my comments.

Regards