Alternatives to macros for accessing data objects

[#1]

Hello QV Community,

I'm about to begin implementing a new version of an Email marketing program for my company. The old version of the program program heavily depended on micros and has about 2000 lines to prepare data for an email campaign to be run. But I have read somewhere that macros are not the best solution to run such heavy tasks and it's better we keep them for simple things.

I'm quite new to QV and I'm the kind of person that likes to learn as I go and not complete a big reference book before I start a project. I'm good at C# and Java but I realized QlikView scripts are in either VBScript or JScript. I have no experience with them whatsoever but they don't look very complicated to me at first glance.

What I was wondering was whether there is a better way of handling data in QlikView? That means can I use another programming language or do you suggest I stick to the script languages provided by QV? Because one big problem I've seen is that as macros get larger they become very hard to debug.

In the old version of our program developed by one of my colleagues who has now left the company, as soon as there was an error in preparing the data, all we got was the macros window with no clue about where the error had taken place. As I would like to implement this project incrementally and little by little, I would like to have a good mechanism for trouble shooting rather than goring though a 2000-line script to understand where the problem comes from.

Your suggestions about how to bring this project to a safe shore are very welcome. So, any good plugins or 3rd party app to monitor the data and facilitate my implementation can help.

Thanks in advance!

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

The way to handle data in Qlikview is use the script language of the Script Editor. This is not vbscript or javascript/ecma script. That is for loading and transforming data into qlikviews internal database. It is not meant to send out lots of email. If you want to do that then Qlikview is not the tool you need.

[jerrysvensson]

Have a look at NPrinting instead.

Third party application that probably will do a better job than a macro solution.

[#4]

Thanks for the answer Gysbert! But the sending of email is done via an external program that is triggered by QlikView. So I have no problems with that part.

[#5]

Thanks Jerry. But should I download both the client and the server?

[#6]

I don't think NPrinting is exactly what I'm looking for. I was wondering if there is a way to replace JScript and VBScript with another programming language to make them easier to debug. I've heard macros are not as fast as the rest of the QlikView.

I still do not know the purpose of QlikView OCX. I'm afraid these concepts for a QV beginner is not well elaborated in the community. I have the document with sample codes for OCX but there is not an example scenario on which these pieces of code can be helpful. Is it possible to replace JScript and VBScipt codes with C# somewhere?