Best practices for generating Tabular, HTML, and PixelPerfect reports with data-absence handling in Qlik Cloud

[theoat]

Hello everyone,

I’m looking to identify best practices for generating reports in Qlik Cloud, whether using Tabular Reporting, HTML Reporting, or PixelPerfect.
One specific point I’m interested in is how to properly handle cases where no data is available at execution time.

👉 Goal: avoid sending the recipient an empty report, a partially empty report, or a PixelPerfect level with no data (bands displayed with no content, blank pages, empty tables, etc.).

#QlikCloudReportingServices

Enjoy your Qlik.

Kind regards,
Théo ATRAGIE.

[Andrea_Bertazzo]

hi @theoat 

You can find tutorials about best practices for In-App reporting (Tabular, HTML and PixelPerfect) in the Qlik help pages. You can also find many nice videos in Qlik platform or in Youtube showing how to work to generate In-App reports. For example this channel.

Generally, In-App reports are not sent if there is no data. They are sent if there are only some empty tables or levels, but there is data in other tables, as you can see in this post.

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi @theoat 

There are as many best practices as many reports requirements you have. Static reporting and layouts vary a lot and often those are driven by data you are working with. I cannot stress enough how important it is in my opinion to properly work on your data model and your Qlik Sense app to allow for minimum required effort on actual reporting template. You need to consider how filters are going to be applied and whether  you have user or report filters you need to use. Those may greatly drive the way you will have to approach this.

The very good example of that is this post here (which I acknowledge is from NPrinting but shows how flexible we can be if we plan properly solution from the beginning and if we look at all requirements altogether: https://community.qlik.com/t5/Qlik-NPrinting/Format-and-hide-tables-in-Word-template/td-p/2538949

Depending on your template you may want to consider using Level or Page node to control visibility of certain sections. Those can be driven from Island (unassociated data) which will not impact rest of the model but will allow you to handle complex report section visibility requirements.

There is also a factor of template capabilities. Pixel perfect containing native abilities to conditionally show sections of the report and excel and html having limitations in that regard.

For me bottom line is: I want to take away complexity from template itself and handle as much as possible in Qlik Sense app. 

I assume this isn't an answer you wanted but it is a reality of more complex reports which the reports with conditional content are.

cheers