Talk to Experts Tuesday - QlikView FAQ

[Jamie_Gregory]

This is the FAQ for the December 15th Talk to Experts Tuesday session on QlikView.

For the recording and transcript, please see https://community.qlik.com/t5/Talk-to-Experts-Tuesday/Talk-to-Experts-Tuesday-QlikView-on-December-1....

Environment: QlikView

I am looking for some help to understand the behaviour of Bar chart auto adjust axis while we move scroll. This is working for only few cases. Let me know if you can help me understand this.
For this question, we would need an example to see the actual behavior. It would also be good to know if this behaved different in a different version (and what that version is) and what version you are currently on. I would also suggest posting this in the Qlik Community. For now, here is the Help documentation for the Bar Chart.

We are on April 2020 SR1 and found that QlikView is using an outdated version of jQuery that has security vulnerabilities. When will the version of jQuery be updated?
That was a defect logged with R&D and the latest version of jQuery that is going to be used is 3.5.1. That is in the just released April 2020 SR3 version of QlikView. If you go to the Qlik Download Site, you can filter on QlikView > Language > QlikView Server > April 2020 > SR3. If you check out the Release Notes, you will find the defect (QV-20277). The 3.4.1 version of jQuery is coming up on a couple of Pentests for security reasons. So April 2020 SR3 will update the version of jQuery to 3.5.1.

What is the expected lifetime for QlikView? Qlik is shifting all its resources to QlikSense over the past few years, and now to SaaS, so the number of changes made in QV are few and far between, leading clients to think it may get decommissioned in the future.
I work regularly with the QlikView team and am on Product meetings. QlikView is alive. As long as clients like it, QlikView is alive. We have already started discussions on what is going to be in 12.70 which would be in 2023. So there is a commitment from the Company as long as people are using. We are not pushing away customers but of course are encouraging clients to go to Qlik Sense because it is newer technology. If there is going to be investment in new technology it is going to be on the product that is more modern. QlikView is going to be updated. We have an investment on the SaaS version as well where you can view QlikView applications in the Cloud. But yes, QlikView is alive. You can count on that.

If there is anything you would like to see added to QlikView, we would recommend entering the enhancement request on the Qlik Ideas board.

Any plans to allow QV to reload in the cloud in the future?
I am not Product Management so I cannot commit on that but definitely there are plans of improving the QlikView experience in the Cloud. That also means considering reloads in the Cloud. That might take time but it’s definitely being considered as an option at least. If you would like a formal word from the Product Management team, please check the Qlik Ideas board and enter an enhancement request there.

Our organization has started the transition away from MS Office to Google Workspace. We have a large number of Excel integrations including output via Nprinting. I've been told it's on the roadmap but can you speak to the ETA of compatibility with Google Workspace? Qlikview for ingesting Excel and Nprinting for output.
I am checking with the team about this question. I do recall on the TTET – NPrinting session that Andrew said they were gauging interest for NPrinting and to enter an enhancement request on the Ideas board. I do not see a request already there so I would recommend posting there to get a direct response from Product Management.

What is the best way to troubleshoot Fiber Loop errors? Any plans to better address fiber loop issues? We see them a lot in QV environments and the logs don’t give a good way to troubleshoot. Qlik articles just say it could be unoptimized apps, disk issues, network issues, etc. very open ended.
Typically, the fiber loops are symptomatic and not necessarily a cause of problems. You’ll get fiber loops when you’re encountering a heavily taxed Windows server (e.g a lot of RAM usage or at/near the working set limits). You’ll typically see this with other types of issues such as internal inconsistency errors that are also listed in the QlikView events log. The best way to troubleshoot the fiber loops is to focus on the other types of errors that you are receiving since the fiber loops are mostly symptomatic. They indicate the server is experiencing a resource shortage. You will see these in the QlikView Server event logs. They are at the WARN level and not necessarily an ERROR but you should set your verbosity to HIGH to see them. You should see any other errors in this log as well that should help troubleshoot what the actual issue is. You will also see this information in the Windows Event Application logs.

How does QlikView manage the CPU load if the system has 16 cores?
The CPU load is mainly used for calculations. When users are active on the system, they will start making calculations and that will increase usage of CPU. As compared to the usage of RAM which is where we store the cache for those calculations. How does it manage it? When QlikView needs CPU it will just start using it. Also, you will want to consider what you doing with your server. Is it just a QlikView server or are you also doing reloads on it? Reloads will definitely take usage of the CPU. In general, it depends on how many users you have on the system and what are they doing. The CPU load will go up until it reaches its limits and then the system become unresponsive. As soon as those calculations are not needed anymore, the CPU usage will be released so it be a problem. 16 cores, it depends on what the system is doing. In most cases it is fine, you might need more or even less.

There’s a good technical brief on how QlikView uses CPUs. I found this on the Support Portal but you can google “Associative Engine CPU usage”. It has a very good description regarding CPUs. I would encourage everyone to read this. This has really good information and some good detail. You’re going to see high usage of CPUs whenever you’re rendering charts or graphs. That’s to be expected. Another point too, if you’re running QlikView server and QlikView publisher on the same Windows server, you may run into issues. The publisher will also require CPU cores in order to generate the QVB engines for reloads. On a 16-core server, you may run into issues on that, depending on the reload schedule. If it’s very heavy and doing it during the day when you have a lot of QlikView users on, you might run into issues with saturating the CPU usage. If you have more cores or your reloads are occurring when you don’t have peak usage, you’ll more than likely be OK. You just need to monitor things and make sure you have enough CPU cores for what you’re trying to do.

For large systems that have lots of reloads, greater than 9, is there still a need to increase the windows heap size? We used to make that change all the time when QlikView was more prevalent?
The QVB engines that are spun up to do the reloads, those are done so based on the COM objects that windows has. Windows has a default availability of 10 COM objects. So the Desktop memory heap is used to increase the COM objects on the Windows side. The change is done in the Windows registry and doing so allows more memory and will make more COM objects available. So yeah, if you’re going to have more than 10 concurrent reload engines, you’re going to want to make that change. There’s some good information on this in this technical brief, as well as information regarding the CPU usage for Publisher (from the previous question).

When I try to create a new sheet object, I receive a pop=up window that says “No such page”. How do I fix this?
This is an IIS issue. Basically, there’s a MIME type that is missing on the IIS side that needs to be added. This is only for AJAX. So you’ll run into this if you have AJAX client and IIS on the QlikView April 2020/12.50 version. So go into the IIS manager then MIME types. Under Actions, add a “.qvpp” file name extension and “text/html” MIME type. Go back to QlikView and refresh the page, you should see the objects now. We have logged a defect with R&D for this because we believe the MIME type should be added during the installation of the QlikView Web Server setting service. The defect has been accepted by R&D and they are working on a fix toward it. In future releases of QlikView, this should be included so you won’t have to take the extra steps of adding the MIME type, it should be included.

Can someone help with an unanswered question about Incremental Load with QVD from Qlik Community?
We will look into this and respond back via the Community.

Why is the access point unavailable, when one cluster node (totally 4 nodes) is in troubles (memory goes usage goes up, maybe a user has a calculation, that forces the server service to restart)? A cluster has to be failure tolerant! A non-functional node must not stop the whole system!
Yes, ideally it should be so. There might be a situation where the other nodes cannot handle the load. So, the whole system can become unstable if one node goes down because it’s not properly scaled. We have some issues with load balancing in some versions, but we have improved that. I don’t know which version but in theory, in case of a high load, the system should be able to handle this or at least realize which server is not working. If there is any problem you can always log a support case and we will investigate it because if the load is high, it can happen that the system is not able to process the new request so the Access Point is not available. We are committed on improving any problems.

I have 11.20 SR21. I know support is ending soon. What day is it and which version should I upgrade to?
11.20 will sunset on December 31st of this year. There is a blog post about this on the Support Updates Blog. If you’re wanting to know which version to upgrade to, my recommendation would be either 12.40 or 12.50 because 12.30 will expire April 30, 2021 which is pretty soon and you’ll want to go with one that will last a little bit longer. If you’re not familiar with how Qlik sunsets its versions, it’s in the blog. After a new release, the previous release will expire in 24 months. So, 12.50 will expire 24 months after the release of 12.60, which means it will expire in April of 2023.

After an upgrade to April 2020 SR2 user not seeing Folder, Documents, Performance, logging, Security, folder access tabs in setup QMC and even license is missing.
It looks like the server lost the license. You’ll want to re-license the server and that should work. One thing that is important, you need to make sure the license is updated before upgrading the product. If you have a license that is still valid but you still have the old LEF, update the LEF before upgrading. If you have a Publisher license as well, make sure you apply both sets of licenses in the correct locations. And in the QMC, there is an “Update License” button at the bottom of that page. Click the button and it will download the most recent LEF from the server and you should be good to go.

We just upgraded to 12.30 and can no longer modify the Easter Egg “GraphicsBackEnd” from 1 (default) to 0. Is there a way around this?
When we went to SKIA II graphics, in the Easter egg “GraphicsBackEnd” is equal to 0. You can try to modify it but it will not work. You can save it but it is not being read. So, the only solution we provide here is just to go to the settings.INI file and put this value there. Because you can set it to 0 or set it 1. But if you want this default value to be read, then you have to set it in the setttings.INI files. Here is an article for this as well.

When I try to open my QVW it says it was developed on a different computer and I have X number of times to open the file again. I used to be able to open all my QVWs without any messages. How do I fix this?
It means your Desktop client does not have a license. So you need to re-license it with either a standalone license or connect to the server. It indicates that you’re using the personal version. The machine ID is included in the metadata of the QVW so when you attempt to open a QVW that was created on a different machine, you might get this message. I believe the default number of times you can open it is 4. So, if you get a new computer and you’re trying to open your QVWs that you migrated over, you should be able to open the 4 times and you will want to save them on the new system so you can open them later. If you do not have a license and you do not have the ability to lease a license, then you will want to reach out to your Account Manager to purchase a license.

What is the future of the IE plugin?
We all know Microsoft is ending support for Internet Explorer next year. So, we will be ending support for Internet Explore as well. The plugin will survive. It will survive in Microsoft Edge Chromium. Running the plugin in Edge is not out of the box. You will need to setup some configuration in Edge. We have this article that shares an example of possible configuration how to set it up. You may find other ways to do it like distributing through group policy. You will need to discuss this with your policy administrator and find a way to make this work in Edge. At the moment it is possible and as long as Microsoft allows that, we will keep supporting the plugin. If Microsoft pulls support for IE mode in Edge, there would be nothing we could do with the plugin. You should start looking into moving to AJAX. The plugin also works in the Cloud.

The QV Plugin is causing issues with the layout while full browser version working fine for the same document. The object and text size are an issue and tend to overlap each other. We have cleared cache, uninstalled the previous version and installed the latest one. It’s still the same result. How do we get this to render correctly? We are on 12.30.
The first thing to check is the “GraphicsBackEnd” setting. You will also want to make sure the IE Plugin matches the version of the QlikView server. Sometimes you will need to delete the ‘QvPlugin” folder in C:\Program Files (x86)\QlikView and reinstall the plugin. If you have a mass plugin installation, the best thing will be to do a Microsoft Group Object or the Microsoft SCCM to do a package to push out.