What is the best practise when it comes to showing the last reload date/time of an application?

[jblomqvist]

Hi all,

I know you can use reloadtime() to get the last time an application was updated by using the function at the front-end.

But sometimes I have seen people use the same function in the script at the end of the script which confused me a little bit.

So what is the industrial best practise when it comes to showing the last reload date to a user at the front end? What is the recommended method and why?

[rwunderlich]

ReloadTime() used in the script or the front-end have quite different values. They both represent the end of the last script run.

When used in script, ReloadTime() is the end of the previous script execution. The current execution has not completed yet. Sometimes people record this time for incremental load or other script logic, but it is of little use to show to the users.

When communicating "last reload" to the user on the dashboard, may people use the ReloadTime() function in a text object.  Many times that is accurate enough.  I prefer to show something about the range of data, like max(OrderDate).  Because data may be loaded from QVDs & scripts may take a long time to run, there can be many hours between "ReloadTime()" and the actual currency of the  data.

-Rob

http://masterssummit.com

http://qlikviewcookbook.com

[johnw]

I include an About tab. On this tab I have the reloadtime() in the front end, but I also have a table of the creation times of all my data sources. I have no idea if users ever check it. Maybe not. But I find it useful myself. Occasionally I put the reloadtime() or some other indicator of data currency on the other tabs, but not often.

We're not 100% consistent with our QVD names and locations, or in having all data loaded first to QVD, but we're consistent enough with it that script like this usually does the trick, occasionally with some concatenation at the end for other sources.

[Data Source Load Times]:
LOAD
"Data Source"
,timestamp(rangemax(evaluate('qvdcreatetime(' & chr(39) & '..\..\server\MasterData\QVD\'
                  & replace("Data Source",' ','_') & '.qvd' & chr(39) & ')')
                  ,evaluate('qvdcreatetime(' & chr(39) & '..\..\server\MasterData\QVD\'
                  & replace("Data Source",' ','')  & '.qvd' & chr(39) & ')'))) as "Last Loaded"
INLINE [
Data Source
Address
Bill Of Lading
Calendar
Catalog
Coil
Coil Load Verification
Coil Main Thread
Coil Proceeds
Customer
Invoice
Invoice Coil
Order Acknowledgement Captions
Order Item
Product Type
Tally
Tally Coil
Truck Control
];