QlikView Development LifeCycle
Organizations may follow different development lifecycle depending on the organizations requirements,size and development methodology but most of the organizations utilising QlikView may follow a similar development style.
I am writing this blog to give novice developers an idea on how QlikView environments work.
QlikView development Life Cycle involve :
– Interacting with Business Analysts and Business users to understand the dashboarding,reporting and BI requirements
– Developer working with the users will create a mockup of the dashboard to show the users how the data will be presented on the screen. Also discussions should take place on the type of device(Laptop,Desktop,Ipad etc.) and screen resolution where this dashboard will be displayed
– After finalizing the requirements, developer will analyze the datasource to get more info on the data elements required to fulfill users requirements. DataSource can be relational database,data warehouse schemas ,excel files or text files. QlikView can source data from any other kind of data sources like SalesForce.com,Google analytics or SAP
– After the data source and data elements are identified, developer will create a datamodel and visualizations using QlikView Desktop.To create robust and optimized datamodel, developer may create n-tier QVD architecture. Datamodel should be created by following best practices recommended by QlikTech
– Visualizations should be created by following visualization best practices. While creating visualizations, focus should be on the data. Any object which does not provide insights into data should not be present in the dashboard
– During the course of development,developer should work closely with the users to take care of any changes or expectations
– After application is developed, it should go through a certification process. Certification process is a review process of the application to see if the dashboard follows best practices
Things to know in Deployment
Once QlikView dataload and visualizations are created , they should be deployed on the server. These QVWs will be executed on the server so that user can view dashboards/visualizations on access point.
Access Point is a web portal and the single point of entry for Business users. It presents a list of QlikView documents to the users according to their authorization and access rights.
In deployment 2 folders/documents are of significance – Source document/Folder and User document/Folder
Source document/folder – contains the Source document/QVWs supplied by the developer
User document/folder – After a distribution tasks executes on QVW in Source document folder, it gets transformed to User document and gets stored into User document folder. A document can be simple reduced or can split up into several small documents by using reduce or loop and reduce settings.User document is a document which user sees when accessing a document through access point.
Deployment Steps
– Once the QVWs are created, developer will copy it into the Source document folder. Source document will be a physical windows folder
– QlikView Management Console (QMC) is used to get access to the QlikView Server and Publisher components
– Developer or any user (with access rights to server) will use QMC to access QVWs in the Source document folder. QVWs will be given appropriate security based on the security rules of the organization
– In QMC, data reload and distribution tasks will be created which will make sure that data is loaded in the QVWs/QVDs and dashboard get distributed to the appropriate users. These dataloads and distribution tasks can be scheduled
– Once distribution tasks is executed, the dashboards will arrive in the User document folder. Users while accessing the dashboard on the access point will be accessing the dashboards from the user document folder
