Suggest an Idea

[mmarchese]

Line charts have 3 options for how to handle missing values:

1. Show as connections
2. Show as zeros
3. Show as gaps

But this feature is limited and unintuitive, leading to periodic forum posts over the years (such as my own) from bewildered Qlik app creators. In this article, Qlik acknowledges this feature's problems to some extent but states that it's "impossible" to fix because there's no way to know which points are missing.

Well, I reject that response. Why? Because it's plainly not impossible. A line chart requires exactly one dimension to be provided for the horizontal axis, and that field contains all the missing points. Maybe the algorithm to extract those missing points from that field wouldn't fit nicely into the Qlik engine, but that's very different from impossible.

Example:

SET DateFormat = 'yyyy-mm-dd';

Fact_Revenue:
LOAD
	[Date],
	Revenue
INLINE [
	Date, Revenue
	2020-01-01, 100
	2020-01-03, 200
];

Dim_Calendar:
LOAD
	[Date]
INLINE [
	Date
	2020-01-01
	2020-01-02
	2020-01-03
];

I create a line chart and choose "Show as gaps."

With no dates filtered out, Sum(Revenue) is shown as 0 for 2020-01-02 if no filtering is applied. This is a borderline case. I'm personally ok with it because Sum(no data) = 0 and because I happen to want to see a zero in this case, but I could see the argument that it's wrong since it's ignoring the "Show as gaps" choice.

When I filter out 2020-01-02, the corresponding data point vanishes and I am left with a connection across it instead of a gap as I had chosen. This case is clear-cut: it's definitely wrong. And the answer to the question of "Which points are missing?" is obvious from looking at the Date field.

Since the missing values dropdown has already been a part of Qlik's app editing interface for many years, effort should be put into getting trivial cases like this to work as users expect.

[Patric_Nordstrom]

Thank you for your feedback on ways to improve our product. While this is something we understand would be useful, it's not on the short-term roadmap. Please continue to show your support for this idea.

Thanks,
Patric

[HolgerV]

We are relatively new to Qlik and struggle with the exact issue on our first project:

Our continous time axis uses 5 Minute intervalls. We don't manage to remove the lines representing wrong data points. And we can't activate data points or labels to clearify the issue as this would blow up the visualization if we zoom out to the whole day.

P.S. : We have tried "include zero-values", adding a fake line with 0 or null data and playing with the "Show as"-Options available. Still looking for a solution. 

[giraffes_heart]

Same issue here - neither unchecking the box "include 0 values" in data handling  section or switching between the 3 "missing values" options in Appearance section makes any difference. Also tried different types of x axes, continuous or not, or converted 0 values into null() or text - my final line chart looks same. 

I wish this gets solved soon, as it is quite major issue visually for effectively understanding the data viz.

[Kyle1]

This is also a large issue that our organization is facing for our visuals. It makes the context of the visual entirely inaccurate.

Please prioritize this and recognize the concern here.

[Jacob_Poole]

This has proved problematic in several cases for my team also.  Hoping for a solution soon.

[QlikSense_Developer]

This has been a problem in multiple scenarios for our team. Hoping to see a solution come in to play before too long.

[Meghann_MacDonald]

From now on, please track this idea from the Ideation portal. 

Link to new idea

Meghann

NOTE: Upon clicking this link 2 tabs may open - please feel free to close the one with a login page. If you only see 1 tab with the login page, please try clicking this link first: Authenticate me! then try the link above again. Ensure pop-up blocker is off.