Q&A with Qlik: App Development - September

[Troy_Raney]

Environment

• Qlik Cloud
• Qlik Sense Enterprise
• Qlik Sense Desktop

Transcript

Welcome to Q&A with Qlik. Today we're going to be talking about App Development
I'm going to quickly introduce myself. My name is Troy Raney. I helped put together webinars and helpful videos like this one, and we've got
A perhaps familiar expert panel for you today. Ola, want to quickly introduce yourself?
Yeah, sure. Thank you. My name is Ola, and I work here at Qlik as a AI knowledge learning program manager, which means that I helped facilitate and create and manage learning with a focus on AI ML
Fantastic. Patrik?
Yeah, my name is Patrik Lundblad. I'm Lead Product Designer in R&D. So I help designing the product that we build and that we use and we love
Great. Thank you.
When you register for Q&A with Qlik, you have an opportunity to submit some questions ahead of time, and we've got a lot of those, so we're going to get started with those, but feel free to
If you have a question in mind, go ahead and enter it in the Q&A tool and we will address it. First question
How can Qlik Cloud AI be improved to better support governed self-service analytics while maintaining data security, lineage, and trust in AI generated insights?
It's a very good question
Yep, and it's a perfect segue to something… a feature, a possibility, or something we released quite recently, which is the AI optimization page.
So, I'll share my screen and just do a short walkthrough of it
So inside an app where you've enabled or actually you're going to be able to see it always, but
You can open up the AI optimization page. You have a panda pop up here to tell you a little bit about what's new in it and so on, and where you can go to get more details.
Learn more, understand the health of your AI and so on
And if you go to the AI optimization page, there are a couple of tabs. So, people who use inside advisor before are used to the business logic and the vocabulary and so on. So this is a replacement to these for when using Qlik Answers
So you have an overview page that shows you a little bit about the description of the application. You can see the usage of your data, how many fields and master items, and what's hidden and what's available.
You actually can start from the top right here. You have a settings page. So for example, you can see what is the setting for if the assistance can be using this thing, should it be in the thinking mode or in another mode to start with
You have some starter questions, so whenever a user is using Qlik Answers for this application.
Maybe don't know what the first question is to ask. Maybe you could have some standard questions that are useful to ask with the type of data within the app
You have a synonym page, which is sadly kind of empty in here, but many times when you talk to an AI
They may not understand the business terms that you're using with your data.
So maybe when your data you have a list of departments or a list of locations
Maybe the values in there that is in your data might not be the way that you're communicating in the office around this. There might be synonyms that you want to have in here so that the AI understands
When talking about the northern store, well, it is the one located in Kirna, because it is the most northern store we have
You have semantic understanding, something I really like, which is that when this app was indexed, the AI went through all the fields, master items, the measures dimensions, and it tried to semantically understand
What can this field and this data be used for?
So, for example, customer or category name, official name or label assigned to each product category serving as the primary identifier and display name for the category classification. And you can see here that this is something that the AI created. This is how the AI understands
What this master dimension is about. But as a user or as a creator of this app, you always have the ability to go in here
And make some changes to it. I'm just going to remove a couple of things in here
Updated, and you can see here that I, as a human, have gone in here and told the AI that your understanding of this field was not perfect. I made some slight changes to it
I also have the fields and master items. So this is your control plane over what's available to the AI and how the AI uses it.
So many things in here are standard. For example, we probably don't want people to have the ID fields available when asking questions, when calculating questions.
So you can, for example, go in here and see the visibility of some of these fields. Some fields are maybe just used for app logic rather than for answering business questions. So it's quite easy to just say quantity is not something that should be available to the AI. Let's hide
You can classify things. Is this a field that can be used as a measure, as a dimension?
If any one of these types available in here, so monetary percentages and so on
Or if you go up here to geography and other things, is this a country, longitude, month, etc.
And there's also, for example, if it is a field that can act as a measure, what is the standard aggregation for it?
So there's a lot of control you have in here for how your data is represented to the AI
But then, as usual, if you use thick answers, if you look at the recent tab, you will always have the lineage about where does this answer come from, which app, which data, and so on.
So in Click answers, you already have the answers to your lineage and so on, but you also have control over how AI interprets and understands the data that you're given access to.
It's a very cool feature.
Short interruption to a very big feature.
Yeah. But it's excellent. Thank you for demonstrating that.
All right, next question
How can I assign specific bookmarked data to each user based on their branch?
Yeah, so the question is asked, there's something missing in kind of the question there. The question is, should I do that? And the answer there is no, you shouldn't from security and data access
You should instead handle that using something called section access. Section access is row and column-based security built into the Qlik script, where you can define what users are able to see what data inside of your application
Where you then can assign, for example, which branch they belong to therefore getting that data up and running
them just seeing what's assigned to their branch.
Yeah.
Section access is great. So I will
Post a couple links here.
Yeah, there's a blog post on Qlik Community that kind of covers a use case for this as well. Also, I may be saying a good word about Qlik Immunity as a great place to get answers to some questions as well. Or if you can't find the answers, ask them yourself, but there's also
almost always posts that cover the key topics.
Definitely. Qlik Community is a great resource.
Excellent, thank you. Okay, next question.
How can I set up each individual sheet to clear selections when users navigate between sheets? I guess they mean those navigation buttons in the right.
Yeah, so it's something called the triggers been available since the days of QlikView. I'll open my share my screen again. I can show you just how to set it up for
Yeah.
So I'm on this sheet, the dashboard sheet. I open up the edit and I go through the sheet properties. Kind of annoying today that you have to click outside any chart to get to the sheet properties
That's the way actually it's not triggers, it's called action. So I can add an action to the sheet here that's called
Clear all selections.
And I can also name it if I have a lot of actions and I want to be able to control them. So whenever you end a user, consumer enters this heat, let's go to a similar sheet. Let's make a couple of selections in here. Let's see up here that I got the
Customer selection. And then when I navigate to my other sheet, the action is applied. The collections are cleared
Fantastic.
So, actions on sheets, you also have actions available to the button object. So when you click on a button, you can have actions happening like a bigger clear selections button if you don't think that the one in the toolbar is big enough for you
Great, thanks.
Our next question. What tool tips are available in table charts and why are they not the same as with other chart types?
So, this is something that, yeah, it is just a standard tool tip. This is something where you can go to click ideation and request feature if it doesn't already exist
Also, if you're sharing the right screen or not, if you want to show quick ideation how to do it
Yeah, let me share
Here we go.
So this is on Qlik Community. You can find it on the support tab
Ideation
We might do a quick search just for tooltip if you want to see if there's anything in there already
Good idea.
Yes, so that people don't create new ideas all the time if they're already existing in there
So there are two tips for Boston, two-tips display duration, background color of tooltip
Add tooltip to measures. Yeah
There's around straight to measure. That might be an interesting one to go in, give it a thumbs up if this is something that you're interested in
And yeah, it gets higher in the list of things that we know that our customers and users are interested in.
Yep.
And this is new to me getting to just give a thumbs up, but rank how interested you are must have, nice to have, not interested. That's really cool.
A little more granularity between the thumbs up, thumbs down.
But this is a great resource to search what else has been suggested, suggest make your own suggestions
Product management weighs this feedback heavily when making decisions on what improvements to make. So definitely check it out.
Again, that's on Qlik Community. All right
Next question
Is there something built in to help me merge slash reduce fields with duplicate values?
Yes, the place where you would want to solve that is inside of the script. And inside of the script you have the joins that you can do left joins, right joins, inner joins, outer joins, and that will help you reduce
Duplicate fields
Fantastic.
Great. Next question.
Can you suggest how to build a -month line chart that always shows three months ahead and nine months before a selected value? That's very specific, but
Yeah, no, but it's also a great question and you can solve this in different parts of the tool. The best place to do this is to create flag fields in your master calendar in the script
That means, every time the script is reloaded or recalculated, you would update with which dates that are, let's say, months ahead and nine months
Before, today's date, or the day when we reload the script
That's… that's the best way to solve it from a performance perspective, from a modeling perspective. It can also be solved inside of the expression editor in the front end of the tool as well. And of course, you can either apply
some set analysis to that to make it static, or you can also make it dynamic, so it'll calculate the and months, depending on which date you select
I had kind of a follow up question to that. You're talking about building a master calendar. I know there's excellent resources out there on how to do that, but
Qlik automatically creates a lot of derived field names or fields based on any date field, which is better, building your own master calendar or using those derived fields? What would you
Recommend.
I would say when if you build a quick app or just want something up and running, the right fields are, of course, good. It doesn't take that much effort to build it and it's a quite clean script
maintained because you're not maintaining it yourself, it's automatically generated. But when it comes to working with states and to be able to handle the
Issues, errors, and problems that can occur with dates, canonical dates, for example, or missing dates, stuff like that, you need to create a master calendar to be able to control those dates, how you want to handle them
inside of the script
Okay, great. Thanks.
Next question
I'm getting a corrupted data error when opening a QVF in Qlik Desktop.
Is there a way to recover the file somehow?
And
There is an article, since this was pre-submitted, I found this
Post on Qlik Community a knowledge article on actually how to address that specific problem. So I'll post a link to that.
But
Also
You might try just right-clicking it since you're already in Qlik Desktop
Open the field without data. That's an option and you might be able to retrieve your script that way if that's the issue.
So
Two resources for you
Next question
Can you help me with creating a carry over the final total from previous year field so that the value is fixed based on the previous year's total
Yeah, this is also there are a couple of ways to solve this as well. One of them is using a master calendar, for example, like we talked about before, and then having a last year to date field inside of that calendar, which is mapping all of the dates that occurred
The previous year, and then you can use that instead of a set analysis in your expression to just show the sales data for those specific flag fields. It can also be simplified depending on the data model and exactly how you register sales, like, you can
And also do a locked date field within set analysis as well. So you can say just show the sales for in this case would be .
So in that case, it'll just show you the sum of the sales for . There's a video that we have on Qlik Community that covers the basis of set analysis. It also talks a little bit about working with dates and the complexity
On that, within set analysis, recommend watching that to get to get you started.
Yeah, that's an excellent demonstration and
You can see quickly here from the chapters all the different things that are covered and addressed in that.
It's really great.
All right. Next question
Is data sorted by default
to a way that it's sorted in the source database, or is there a way to set a default sort when loading?
Yeah, this goes back to looking a little bit on how our engine and how data is loaded and how that's handled. The quick answers to that is yes and yes
Which to expand on that, the data is stored in the way that it's loaded. And if that data isn't sorted in the way that you want to
So probably yes and no. If the data isn't sorted in the way that you want to, you need to resort that data, and you do that by doing a resident load that's loading the data from the table that's just been loaded from the source, and then doing a order by statement there
And the order by statement can just be applied on a resident table, so you can't do it directly on the source table.
And then that would be the way to solve that.
Great. All right
The next question
How to use AI for app development in Qlik.
Yeah.
Talking about MCP skills, agents, etc.
Sure.
Yeah, let's focus on the MCP server just to kind of answer the question throughout that context. What you can do, of course, is that you can connect your favorite LLM Cloud ChatGPT or another tool to the Qlik environment to get access to
What we choose to expose through the API, the tools that we expose. So if you select Qlik MCP tools there, Troy, which is the tab before that. So this is what you have access to through the MCP servers. So you can basically be in Claude and ask them to
inside a cloud to create sheets based on the data in your data model. You can explore your data. It can update visualizations. When you create a new sheet, it'll end up as an AI generated sheet inside of your application
So it's very, you can look very close to exactly what happens there as well. So that's the way to kind of work with the built-in functionalities. And when it comes to the skills, there are a couple of skills available for the MCP. All of them are governedby us, so we have some official skills that we've created, and then there are some community skills where you can
send in your skill, and then if we look at it and see that works well and kind of applies to everything that we want to, we
We'll place it under community skills there as well. The community skills aren't
Activated by default, so you need to activate them if you want to start using them. So that's kind of how we handle it today. I know this is something that we're working on as well, where you'll probably see more from the skills perspective moving forwardBut this is the, again, how we can handle it right now. There is also a great link on Qlik Learning, and this link is currently this learning path is currently open and free for all registered users. Normally, this would be
This has been kind of hands-on content, so it'd be tied to a subscription. But for now and a couple of months forward, it's going to be… it's available for everyone. And there is an MCP server course that kind of covers a little bit and gives examples, for example, for how to use the MCP server for app development.
And some other platform operations they can do as well. And in a couple of weeks, we're going to update and expand on the MCP content within this learning path as well. So we'll go a little bit more on exactly how to set it up and work with it.
Exciting. Great
Next question
Inversion control and script editor AI assistance - IS version control and script editor AI assistance on the product roadmap for the Windows on-premise version of Qlik Sense?
It's a good question.
So yeah, it's a good question. Right now, if you want to do version control on Qlik Sys on-premises, you can do this through a couple of third-party tools that are available
And that's kind of what we… what we have right now. When it comes to script AI script editors, there isn't anything right now, but we do have or we are looking at the MCP connector
For, like, on-prem as well, and that will, of course, then allow you to use AI assistant
Script editing within the platform
That's very cool to be able to use Claude with Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows, something like that.
Nice.
So be looking forward to that. That's really cool.
Yeah, there is also a follow-up question in the chat right now that asked if there's any timeline for this or sorry, no, it says if it would be available for Qlik Sense Enterprise product development
I don't have any… all the details, but what I said right now without committing to anything is the best answer to that question.
Yeah.
But in the future, you will be able to connect MCP server to an on-prem Qlik Sense server.
That's what we believe.
Yeah.
It's very exciting. Great. These are all great questions.
Let's go move on to the next one.
Next question, is there a straightforward way to trigger an NPrinting publish task based on the scheduled refresh
completion of the related underlying Qlik app.
I think the
Word here is straightforward, but so
Yeah.
If we're talking about the cloud, we're probably not using NPrinting, but reporting. So if you were to solve this within Qlik Cloud, you would do that using an automation. And this is a quite simple automation to set up. You just set up an automation. It triggers off app completion, and then when app completion is done
You use the Qlik reporting API and generate the report, or whatever you want to do there, publish the report and send that out. So that's straightforward. If you're talking about on-prem, it's a little bit trickier because then you need to… what you need to do is that you need to, in the end of your reload task
trigger a webhook or an API call to the nprinting API called the end printing repository API. And then what you can do is you can set it up so it's only upon successful completion, and then so it never kind of triggers
My reload is failed, and then when that's done, you can trigger that and kind of generate your reports.
Great answer.
All right, next question.
Those questions asked in dashboard counts count towards the thousand questions I can ask in my tenant
So
I guess we're talking about using answers
On the little side panel, does that count towards the capacity limit per month?
My assumption, yes, it does. Any question asked to answers could be is part of the quota
Yeah.
It is, and we can also add the MCP here as well, right? Because we've been talking about that. So MCP questions as well do you tally towards the 1,000 questions you can ask
It's a little more complex with the MCP because it could generate agents that
Talk to other agents and those don't, those internal questions where it's
Calculating don't, but
Yeah.
And if you want to know some more information about
capacity and what is counted. We had a Techspert talk addressing all those details. Monitoring Qlik Cloud capacity.
So I recommend you check that out
And you can see some tools for monitoring
We go into all the details.
So I'll post the link to that as well
Great.
Next question
If it can't be answered today, perhaps you could advise offline, but… If I want a Qlik Cloud automation triggered by a webhook event.
Another automation completed successfully and also scheduled to only run on certain days of the month. How would I do that in an automation?
It's not based on a variable in the app, just based on today's date. I looked at a condition block, but received null value in trying expressions such as day now
It's very cool you're working on some complex automations.
What do you guys think?
Yeah.
Yeah, this is kind of a hard question to just answer on the outbounds, because I need to sit down and look at it a little bit more in detail, but
I mean
Just looking at it from a logical perspective, it should be doable, but I would need to sit down and test around a little bit exactly to find the answer.
Maybe we can
Yeah.
I can't remember if there's a condition
Block
specific for
Days of the month
But that feels very doable.
I think it's the format, I think day now is more something you use inside
Right.
a click application as an expression. I think that the format for the condition block is just slightly different. So I think we just look at the help page. It's curly bracket date colon
simple as possible if now, and then you should be able to get the current data set. So it's just about
Don't use a click expression in automation. Automation sadly has its own expression language. Okay.
Yeah
Yeah, language for doing calculations, so on.
That's helpful.
Yeah
And yeah, and there's also you can also use working when we work with formulas there you can toggle through kind of the natural language
version of the formulas and how they look in the actual expression themselves. I'm adding a link to the help article on that in the chat right now, because that can help you to kind of redefine the formula as well, so you can see maybe that's what you were
Yeah.
alluding to Patrik, but that's just to kind of see that post as well, so you can toggle between the natural language version and the formula version.
And if you go up a couple of pages, I can also post it. That's the link to the working with dates in automations.
Beautiful.
So I think, I think it's just the syntax, I think it's just how you write expression, that's the difference.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Great resources.
Next question.
Is training only applicable to cloud? We use enterprise and the appearance and options look different, such as the AI tool.
So, good question.
Yeah, that's great. And it kind of gets me to talk about Qlik learning as well, which is one of my favorite topics. There is, of course, a Qlik Help. It has some good training on it as well, but Qlik Learning is our big learning platform
There we go.
Where we have a lot of courses. And no, it's not just on cloud, it's on on-prem as well, where the content is available, of course, we can't do trainings on click answer on-prem because Qlik Answers isn't available on-prem, for example, but there are on-prem
products that we have training for and click learning as well, where we wouldn't have that on the cloud version as well. So yeah, you can scroll down there and you see products, for example. There are multiple different ways of finding, but here you can click Qlik sense in the middle
there, for example, in reporting, and here you'll have some of the courses that are available. You'll see if there's subscription-based, or if they're available in the free tier, and then you can go and
Explore that further
Yeah, a lot of great resources there.
But it's good you're pointing out that
But the AI tool, just to give a comment, there isn't AI tool available on-prem right now. There are AI capabilities like the Insight Advisor, of course, but there isn't like answers or an MCP server available for
on-prem currently
But like we said, that is coming.
Yeah, if it would be released, we would probably release training on it as well.
Great.
Next question.
Our source system triggers several extractor apps in Qlik Cloud via REST API calls.
What is the best pattern in Qlik Cloud to automatically trigger the downstream analytical model app
Only after all parallel extractors have finished reloading successfully
Application automation would be my answer here. Just also one of these that you might want to think about a little bit more, but the application automation, I don't know if we have a text expert talks on that as well, but
It's great for kind of building up these kind of custom
actions inside of the system that depend on other systems as well.
Yeah, especially if you wanted to wait until all those
Parallel extractors have finished that
Yeah
I totally agree.
And there is also for I know for Qlik Automations, there is some predefined templates, and I think there is one on parallel reloads as well, which could be relevant here. I don't know, Patrik, could you
Share your screen, because I don't have mine up and running, and just show the application automation where you create it and what templates that are available there as well.
Sorry if we're
Of course, I was looking at the next question.
But
Yeah, automations
You can go to
That's great, your automation.
Yeah, just create new automation just to see the… There it is.
Yeah, just go to create new automation. And here are a lot of, it was on the top, the parallel reloads one. So you can, if you just go on details on that template. Here's I don't know if this will solve, this might just solve part of the question, but
Here's a template set up for that, and it also kind of explained a little bit here on what it does. I can see the documentation isn't that much, but there is a community article that's linked inside of this description as well, so you could get some more information on that. So I'd look
at that when it comes to kind of chaining stuff together.
Yeah, I love that article on how to use build task chains with Qlik Automate. That's great.
Great answer. All right. Next question.
Is there a way in the scatterplot to illustrate via dynamic bubbles the
Dynamic Bubble, the center of gravity of all the bubbles.
Yes
Hardly had enough credit to work in the few minutes I have, but I can show you the health article
Actually, I can show you what it was looking like.
You have in the scalloplot and a couple of other shards in the adults, something called shapes. So
You click here, you can add a shape such as a point, such as a line, such as a polygon
If you add a point, you should be able to go in here and set the x-axis position, the y-axis, the position, the symbol, and things like that
And had I got into work, it would have been added like in here, for example. Yeah, you could do the average sales and the average margin, and then you would have, yeah
Your own positioning there, either as a bubble or as a square or something like that
And you can also do things like adding lines between a data values
You can also add in polygons. So you can create, for example, the typical. You want to have a left quadrant right quadrant, things like that
And there's many different ways of partitioning the data in here using areas and so on
Yeah
Definitely possible. Sadly, I did not get it to work in the few minutes I had
I'll post the link in the chat for the help page. Yeah
But that's great. Could you share that link with me?
Great.
Here is that link
All right
Next question
Is there a way to inspect the MCP server to discover its underlying tool schemas and API calls when a specific capability, like creating a visualization, isn't clearly listed?
Yeah, but if you can just bring back the tools link from
Sure.
the Qlik Help page just to kind of get that up and running because that has it
Sorry, I had a lot of there we go
That has all of them listed, or what we expose right now, and this is, yeah, so the MCP tool. So if you scroll down a little bit here, you'll see that there's a table, and this
Tells exactly which tools you have access to. And this is what you would get back as well if you ask through the MCP server and asked it what it can do using the Qlik MCP server
And these are also
And I can also say definitely
If you scroll down further a little bit, Troy, as well, there's also a little information on what these tools accomplish as well. Sorry, Patrik.
There is work in progress also around visualization and other things, so that they're going to be able to inspect the schemas of association and give back, for example, every property available on a chart.
So, more to come in that area
Excellent.
I'll just post the link to this page
Great.
Next question.
Is there a spreadsheet type chart that allows free form columns and rows? Currently, I have to do separate charts for each column, such as month to date, variance to prior month, variance to target, etc.
So I kind of assume that this is the visual exploration available both in the new straight table and in the new pivot table
I can share my screen. We can just do an example.
Yeah.
Let's delete the scatterplot not working. Let's go to shards. So, the one thing to have in mind here, and
This depends on if you're on cloud and it looks like this. If you're on-prem, you may or may not have available this pivot table, depending on which release you're on.
So, we have the legacy charts down here, which is the old table and
So, and we have the new pivot table here
I can actually remember which one is which, I'm just gonna have to add a C.
Yeah, so this is the old pivot table. And then you also have the new pivot table just called the pivot instead.
So in the new field table, you can add in dimensions and measures. So for example, I want to have in country and name, for example, available here as a dimension.
But I also want to have an alternative that people can also say the cylinders and years.
Or actually in the columns down here
No, actually, let's get it straight up. I can add in if you… I want a dimension to be used as a row or as a column, or if it should be in there. And I can actually say here if they should be shown by default or if they should be hidden. So let me actually hide these two columns up here
that they're not available to consumer user to begin with.
Then I can add in a couple of measures in here, average price, average weight, and horsepower
Some measures I have available, and I might want to hide the horsepower in here
And then in appearance on the short exploration, I can make short exploration available to the users of this sheet of this visualization.
So now when I go out of the editing mode on the left hand side here there is this chart exploration panel where a user of this chart can go in here and select
What data should be available inside the app or inside the chart and also the position of it. So for example, I might want to add in year here. I can drag and drop year to be first in the list. I can expand some values in here. I can move country to
The top is dead, or I can move the values to the top.
So just enabling visual exploration on the new pivot table should make that spreadsheet experience where people can hide and show columns and move the columns and rows around
It's very cool
And
Do those changes affect other users' experience, or is that just for that individual's
So, that is just for the individual, so it is not something that you're doing for other people. And if the individual wants to say what they've been doing, they can create a bookmark with the same layout state on the bookmark. That means they can come back to that table at a later date
And
See the same view that they had before
Awesome.
So you want to set up your normal view of that type of data.
Great. Well, so far, that's all the questions been submitted. These have been great questions. Thank you so much, everyone, for your participation today.
Thank you so much, everyone, for your time. Thank you to this expert panel.
And I hope you all have a great rest of your day.