STT - Migrating QlikView to Qlik Cloud

[Troy_Raney]

Environment

• QlikView
• Qlik Cloud
• Qlik Sense Enterprise

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the April edition of Techspert Talks. I'm Troy Raney and I'll be your host for today's session. Today's Techspert Talks session is Migrating QlikView to Qlik Cloud with a couple of familiar experts from our Customer Success team. Sav, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Thanks Troy. So I'm Program Lead in the Move to Cloud team within Qlik. Part of the Program Lead role is to look at tooling and our approach and bring that all together so we can help our customers understand how they can Move to Cloud better.
Great. And Adam?
Adam Jacobs part of the Move to Cloud team as a Technical Specialist. My role is to help customers understand what goes into moving to cloud, how they can take advantage of tooling and how they can start strategizing around that migration.
Fantastic. Thanks guys. So today, Adam is going to take us through a demo of actually using the QlikView to Qlik Sense Migration Tool. We're going to talk about why now is a good time and we'll save some time for Q&A. Sav, could you tell us what is this QlikView to Qlik Sense conversion tool?
Sure. The QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool is a new tool that we've built from scratch to convert QlikView applications to Qlik Sense. It is generally available today as of April 8th from Qlik Community via Qlik downloads and it essentially automates one-to-one conversion of your QlikView applications including the full layout in under 5 minutes per app. It's a free tool as I mentioned developed by Qlik’s Move to Cloud team and is Supported by Qlik Support and going forward it will be integrated into the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool.
Great. So Adam, I would love to see this demo. But before we jump into that and the tool, what example QlikView document are we going to be converting today?
Yeah, we're going to be converting a document here that has been used in the past. This is a document that we would demo a lot. Asset Management. The reason why we chose this document is there's actually quite a few areas here that are, you know, important to show. For instance, show/hide conditions. So if you notice, if I make a selection on one of these asset classes for example, everything else is hidden. They appear otherwise. And also if I go to this next tab here, same deal. There is this gray bar here hiding everything until I make a selection. Now the fund is ultimately shown. And then of course there's multiple other sheets as well, but you get the idea.
Yeah, it's got a lot of sheets, a variety of objects with triggers and actions showing and hiding things. So there's a lot going on. Now you've already downloaded the tool, right?
Yeah. Let's go ahead and launch the converter. So, all this is: is it's an .exe. You do need to be on Windows, but the .exe is nothing to be installed. All it does when you double-click it, it launches a command line that will look for an open port within your environment and open up the converter right into your browser. It's running locally. And there's the port that's being used.
All right. So, it lays out everything into a 10-step timeline here. How do we get started?
Yeah. Well, by starting with the setup and defining the workflow mode. Before I do that though, worth noting over on the side here is a collapsed panel. You'll notice there is a PowerShell here or the option for Bash. In both these cases, as we are working through the tool here, it is going to fill out this PowerShell script which can if you want to be copied and run by yourself in PowerShell rather than through the tool. But in the back-end, ultimately it's going to execute against that PowerShell anyway. And you'll see that as we get to the last step, which is to run the conversion. First step is to make sure that we define the appropriate workflow mode. We're going to work in Build to Cloud, but you can just export to a QVF or you can do what's called a Local Only: unbuilding the QlikView app and creating all the JSON files necessary to build a Qlik Sense app. But we're going to stick with Build to Cloud since that's the true kind of end to end of this tool. Next, we're going to come in here and define our Project. I am going to find my QVW from that Asset Management app. Ticked on here is to autogenerate the PRJ.
And what's a PRJ?
A PRJ file is or essentially a folder filled with XML that is metadata about the QlikView document. If I leave this ticked on, when we ultimately run the conversion, it will autogenerate that PRJ. But I'm going to show just how fast it actually does generate that PRJ by clicking autogenerate PRJ here. Also, having this PRJ defined and ready is going to be helpful in a future step.
Oh, so it it's already created the folder with all those files necessary to recreate the document?
Exactly. It happens very quickly. So now we have that ready to go.
Nice.
Next, we're going to define where the Output is going to go. So this is where all the logs as well as a summary Excel document are going to be placed. We'll select this folder and I am just going to have it create a new folder for me.
Okay.
So next we have the cloud authorization. In other words, connecting to Qlik Cloud in order to have this ultimately land in Qlik Cloud.
Okay. So here you're pointing to the tenant you already have set up?
You do need to have a tenant in order for it to land. If you do not already have a context created, you create a context down here. You just provide the context name, URL, and API key. And if you're concerned about how to do that.
Look at that, instructions built in.
Yeah, bunch of help step by step how to generate the API key. But there is a context already created. Now I'm ready to move on to defining some features of the Qlik Cloud application. So if I want to change the name of the app when it's landed, I can do that here. If I leave this blank, it'll have the same name as the QlikView document. I can choose to have the sheets published right when it's converted. I'm going to turn this off because I may need to do some editing of the sheets after it's converted.
Okay.
This is where I also define if I want the app to be reloaded, and I do. It's much easier to interpret how well the conversion took place if the visualizations have data in them.
That makes sense. So, does a binary reload?
Exactly. After it's built the app, it will add a little bit of script to define a binary load, it will have the QVW temporarily loaded into cloud. It will binary from that QVW. Once it's done that, remove the QVW. It will remove just the part of the script that was the binary load, preserving the original script. And now I'll be able to see all of my visualizations. If for anything that's a large QVW / QVF, there are limitations depending on your subscription tier. If you have a larger QVWs, you'll have to just be content with loading the QVF in there, having it build but without data and after that get the data loaded before fiddling with QVF. What we'll see later is the ability to reuse an existing cloud app. You don't like the settings that you used, you can just reuse the same existing cloud app.
That's if the initial conversion isn't right; you can adjust the settings and keep overwriting the cloud app until you get it perfect. Okay.
Exactly. You can play around with different settings until you get it right. So, next we're going to go into styling. This is where we can define a theme. Any themes that exist in the cloud tenant already.
Okay.
Does recommend that Sense Classic may be the best option because it's the least intrusive, but that is ultimately up to the developer to determine. We can reuse sheet background images. This is useful for keeping that same look and feel if you want to. You also can fall back to document background here. Background color override. This is where you can define if you want the sheet headers or not. If I were to tick this on, the tab sheet names are now going to be used as the sheet headers in cloud. You can also skip hidden sheets. A lot of developers use hidden sheets to play around with different development,
Right.
I'll skip those hidden sheets so we're not end up with too many sheets in cloud that are unnecessary. Preserving QlikView list box colors and keeping the date field sorts in place. So these are things you can take on and off as well. And then this is where having that PRJ created ahead of time comes into play. You can set your canvas and the scale at which this will convert. If we use the mockup studio here, this allows me to go into the different sheets.
Oh wow.
And see how these settings are going to look when they are implemented into cloud. Uh I can adjust my scales here, whether it's the canvas scale, the object scale. If I want to, I can adjust them independently, adjust some, you know, size constraints, min width, mid height, things like that. Right now, we're have this set on a fixed pixel canvas.
Uhhuh.
I can see what that fixed pixel canvas looks like on various screen sizes. So, you know, larger screen sizes.
Yeah, because QlikView was very static, right?
Exactly. You see if I switch to dynamic grid, how that changes. We'll start with fixed pixel canvas at first.
Okay.
Close this because these settings are good.
That's so cool how it can preview how it's going to appear on the screen depending on the dimensions of the monitor. That's nice.
Exactly. Yeah, it can be very helpful determining what the right ratio might be for any given QlikView app to go into cloud. We also have some script replacements as well. So there are eight default rules essentially normalizing backslashes in Qlik Sense to make sure that they work appropriately. This can also be useful for adding additional rules around things like connection strings.
Right. So if you build the Qlik Cloud versions of those connection strings, you can set this up to replace the QlikView versions?
Exactly. Yeah. And if you get it right, you can export this so that you have it saved and imported in for any future jobs as well. This here is just some information about how the conversion report will be generated and where it's going to go. I don't need to make any changes here. The last step before conversion is just to review all the settings. So I can make one last check before I ultimately run the conversion. And so I'm going to go ahead and click Run Conversion here. And now we're going to start seeing this run through, and do the local conversion first. So extracting everything and placing in the right format and then starting the Qlik Cloud build here to upload things, build the existing app, upload the media, any alternate states, sheet backgrounds, sheet background colors, etc. until finally at the end here it will first it will generate the Excel report that we can look at after.
And is that report just a log of everything that's been done?
It does log all of the different conversions. Also, as we'll see when we open it up later, it will show us things like dimensions and measures that exist in the app, which can be very useful for later on when needing to add master items into the app. You can use that sheet and a Qlik Automation to actually generate master items into the app if you would like.
But it looks like it's done. It was super quick.
Yeah, it had 156 in scope objects and five that were out of scope. Those out-of-scope objects were just the current selections visualization which is no longer needed in Qlik Sense. So that's considered out of scope. Of those 156, 154 were auto-converted. One needed a placeholder, another needs an adjustment. If we scroll down a little bit here, we can be directed to those actions required. We can also see details here about how things were handled. If we look down here at the Overview, this gives us a lot of information here about what was converted, how it was converted, different object types that were converted. We can see the objects requiring attention. We have the placeholder here. We can see why it was a placeholder. We can see what sheet it's on. The type, which is an extension. It's worth noting this will not migrate custom extensions. It won't migrate macros either, but we will call out where the macros were, what they were doing, so that action can be taken to reproduce the type of actions that were being taken in those macros, but those won't be converted.
Right. Extensions and macros. That makes sense. But it is nice that you call out exactly what they were doing.
We also have here a button that was converted, but the action was not. We're not interested in trying to recreate the print report action. That's something that's going to need some manual intervention to try to recreate using Qlik Reporting in cloud.
That makes sense. Well, I'm very excited to see what the actual app looks like. Can we Yeah. jump into
Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. So, all we have to do is open app. So, we'll go straight to the Qlik Cloud app.
All right. Here it is. And like you said, all the sheets have not been published, so you can continue to make edits.
Exactly. What we're using when we're doing the fixed pixel canvas is we are utilizing the Layout Containers for everything. So each of these sheets is comprised of one big Layout Container with visualizations inside of it.
Okay.
And if we open up the dashboard here.
Look at that. It looks great.
Yeah. So we can see here that the visualizations all are looking pretty good here. There might need to be some manual intervention for a few things, but we can see that the functionality is in place. you know, clicking Equity. There's the show/hide that we saw before. If I click this button here to clear all, that button still works. If we move to a different sheet, this Investment Profile, this was that same big gray box until you select the fund name. That ultimately works. There always does need to be a little bit of adjustment here. You know, that current selections box that's no longer needed.
Right. Sense has a selection bar.
Similarly here, if I clear out the selection here, this table extends beyond the box here. And the reason for this is that QlikView tables didn't automatically extend to the end of the visualization box.
Right. The converter can't know that that gray square was meant to hide a visualization behind it.
Exactly. So, I will need to, you know, come in here, extend this. But that just shows some things do ultimately need to happen to make this work. If I go to this sheet here, worth showing a couple things here. One, this is the placeholder that we were talking about.
Oh, very nice.
This is this is that extension that couldn't be migrated. Gives information about it, reason why it couldn't be migrated, also recommended next steps.
I love it giving tips about how to actually replace the functionality.
Yeah. Yeah. Just making sure that you keep this until you're ready to replace it ultimately so you don't forget. Also, you see this incomplete visualization. This is just another call out of the difference between QlikView and Qlik Sense. In QlikView, if you have a table and a invalid dimension in that table, it's just going to skip that dimension and still render the table. Qlik Sense won't. There's that invalid dimension. We do need to edit the properties here and either remove this dimension or we can come in here and fix it by fixing it from Account to Account Name and applying that. Looks like someone in the original QlikView document just put the wrong name there. Now that's safe. So if we go back to the converter tool here first I'd like to show the report. So we can see from the report here we have all these different tabs that show a lot of different information. And so we can see information about what variables there are, data model fields, the different tables that exist. So this is even looking into the
Wow, lot of information there.
Yeah. And you can see now we have object dimensions, object measures.
Now that we've seen what the tool can do and how quickly, can we try it again with some tweaks?
Yeah. If we go here to the cloud app, I will tick on to reuse existing cloud app. And you notice it automatically provides the app ID of the app I just used. If we continue here, I'm going to not use the sheet background images this time.
Okay.
Keep the background as white. I'm also going to not preserve the QlikView list boxes colors and make those also white. Everything else I will leave the same here. So, if we go to Advanced, now is where I can instead of using fixed sheet canvas, I'm going to make this dynamic. So, if we open up the mockup studio, we can see that you we can play around with the dynamic aspect. Once we're set here, nothing changes about the conversion report, review our settings, and then we will rerun the conversion. So, what this is going to do first, it's going to do the local conversion again. That doesn't change with the Qlik Cloud build. What it will do at a certain point is it will start building over the sheets essentially eliminating the previous sheets and building the new sheets on top.

There's no reload needed this time because the data is already in the app.
All right.
So, probably go about the same amount of time though because of this preparing sheets portion takes a little bit of time. Maybe it'll go actually a little bit past what we had before, but that's okay. Still goes pretty fast.
But I'm really interested in that dynamic aspect what that will look like because that's a big shift making a QlikView document.
Exactly. Some QlikView. Exactly. Some QlikView apps, they'll look better in fixed pixel canvas versus dynamic. Dynamic has the added benefit of making sure that no matter what screen size someone's looking at, everything will, you know, render according to their screen size. But, you know, that could always mess a little bit with existing QlikView stuff that was built for Fixed Pixel. So, you can see all the same reporting here. So, nothing's really changed here. If we go back to our app now, we notice that, you know, this is fitting to the sheet. There's no scroll bar needed. Now, I may need to adjust a few things here. Like, yeah, this I can I could probably fix it this way.
There you go.
Right. By just There we go. So now we don't get that same overlay. You know, may still want to use the gray box. Could also remove it. You may need to adjust some things as needed, but ultimately all the functionality still going to be there just like last time.
And so quick, I'm still like blown away at how fast it did that.
Not only is it quick, for anyone who's tried to convert a QlikView app to Qlik Sense before, this takes away between 90 and 99% of the work needed to get a QlikView app into Qlik Sense and into Qlik Cloud.
Now, Adam, does this need to go one app at a time or is there a way to do more than one app?
Great question. So, if we come over here to our project, one thing I didn't point out before, we're on single project here. I can revert this to batch to find a folder here. Scan the folder and this will look for QVWs that are there. If I actually open up this folder here, we can see that we have all of these different QlikView apps. A lot of them don't have PRJS yet, but that's okay. These are all things that we can convert. If I rerun this again with those settings that I applied before, this will now convert all of those QVWs, not just one.
That's so cool. So you can just point it to a folder in Windows and it will convert all those apps at once. That makes it especially easy if the same settings apply well.
Exactly. Yeah. If a developer develops one QlikView app, they're going to develop all of their QlikView apps in the kind of the same way, which means that the settings for one app for a particular developer should work pretty well for all of the rest of their apps.
And you basically just tweak that back and forth until you get those settings right. And then you can do a batch job and migrate a lot at once?
Exactly. You know, if you made some changes, like for instance, fixing this incomplete visualization here, things that you fixed about visualizations before, those will need to be reapplied if you do another iteration.
Right. Any manual edits will need to be redone. Sav, back to you. Why is now a good time to migrate to Qlik Cloud?
For sure. The tool is now way more capable in converting QlikView applications. There's a lot more AI powered analytics that is available in Qlik Cloud today. So you can turn your existing QlikView dashboards into more intelligent applications and enhance that with Qlik Answers, Qlik MCP Server and our powerful Qlik Cloud platform. The key thing is that you can keep your logic and your investment. There's no changes needed to the business logic or your Set Analysis any of the charts or the expressions that you've got essentially convert them to Qlik Sense instantly modernize them into Qlik Cloud and you can serve those insights to your users. It's faster development as well. So the conversion is handled with this tool and therefore you can start to decommission infrastructure and start getting your return on investment. This conversion was also there to futureproof your analytics. You want to modernize your analytics. You want to make use of AI and MCP and these capabilities are all in Qlik Cloud. And this is now an enabler an accelerator for you to get your QlikView analytics up to Qlik Cloud. You've seen the demo from Adam. It can convert applications to Qlik Sense one by one or in batch. We can preserve the look and feel or you can customize and tweak it and it's accurate and fast.
Yeah, the speed is what I'm most impressed with because I've done this manually before and it took a while. So, this is just amazing.
Yeah, it is. And we're seeing a 10 to 30 times reduction in speed. At 10 times is conservative. What we've seen with real customer migrations is higher than that. Up to 20 to 30 times savings. That's less than 5 minutes per app end to end.
So, there can certainly be some mature complex QlikView apps out there. Can you break down what is actually converted?
For sure. The approach that we took was to focus on the hard things first. It's not just the charts. It's actually all of the logic. Very complex, you know, high fidelity applications. Some of those things are conditional show and hides, alternate states, cycle groups and drill groups, button and sheet actions, and all the table styling and colors. That's all been mapped across.
And Set Analysis. That's huge. Fantastic.
Yeah. It also handles conditional coloring, the trellis charts, reference lines and trends, and dimension and measure overflow. This tool will get actively worked on. So any other gaps that we see and feedback from our customers, we'll then look to incorporate as well. We've got a quick side-by-side comparison, a one-on-one conversion of all of the front-end objects, plus the formatting of those charts and objects, too. And if you look closely, there is buttons and checkboxes which changes the UI, the user interface and what the user can see. And that is also mapped across as well. So you get the layers in your visualizations. You get the interactive experience that you had in QlikView ported over across into Qlik Sense too.
Okay, now it's time for Q&A. Please submit your questions to the Q&A tool on the left-hand side of your On24 console. A few have already come in, so I'm just going to read them from the top. First question, is there a possible offering from Qlik Professional Services to recreate and reassign bookmarks from QlikView?
There is Professional Services that can Support in any of your migration scenarios. We have various tools that can help enhance the migration experience, namely the QlikView to Qlik Sense Converter tool and the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool and a tool that we have for the QlikView bookmarks. What I would say is reach out to your account executive to learn more around what Qlik Professional services can offer in terms of migration Support. And just to mention some further resources, you can download the tool from the Qlik Product Downloads via Qlik Community. The full documentation of the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool is available on Qlik Help in the Migration Center and on there you can get all the topics around getting started and the system requirements for the tool itself.
Fantastic. Next question. Is there a recommended learning pathway for QlikView users to understand the differences in Qlik Sense?
There are tons of videos out there to watch for free around learning how to work with Qlik Sense and work within Qlik Cloud. We also have a great education program that includes instructor-led education as well as self-paced education through learning.qlik.com. So all of those are excellent ways to begin learning how to work with Qlik Sense versus QlikView.
Specifically on the tool, there is one learning pathway that will be available for customers for free.
That'll walk through the same kind of stuff?
Yeah.
Fantastic. Looking forward to that. Next question. Will reload schedules (we have a lot of task chains) will those be migrated as well?
Yes Troy. So that is planned on the road map. What we will be prioritizing is the integration of the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool within the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool. The plan with the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool is to include the capability to migrate task chains from Qlik Sense and we'll also explore QlikView as well.
Okay. So it will be able to handle task chains in Qlik Sense. So it's just that's great to know that is on the road map. Fantastic. Next question. Is there a special license necessary to set up data gateway for Qlik Cloud? And for those you don't know, data gateway is a tool to help you connect on-premise sources to your cloud tenant.
Yeah, there's no additional license needed. That is something that is included with any cloud tenant.
Fantastic. All right, next question. Is there a version of QlikView desktop available with Qlik Cloud?
You can copy and kind of paste your QlikView apps into Qlik Cloud directly and use them in Qlik Cloud, though you won't be able to reload them there. You can also use some of your QlikView infrastructure to actually serve up QlikView apps into Qlik Cloud that reload on-premise and then are served into cloud to interact with, but there isn't a version of QlikView desktop necessarily available with Qlik Cloud.
And I was thinking a big function of that is served with Personal spaces. Now you can do all your development in your own personal space in the cloud.
Yeah. Any development that you're doing, you can do either in personal spaces or in shared spaces in collaboration with other developers.
Right. Next question. Are there any prerequisites to migrating or using this tool?
If you're going to migrate to cloud, you do need to make sure you've have that cloud tenant ready to go and able to get an API key. You will need a QlikView app to migrate. Of course, I think we have used some QlikView apps that go pretty far back as far as versioning go. Sav, can you recall if there's any version of a QlikView app going back that hasn't worked?
Not off the top of my head.
Worked on every version we've been able to test. So, and we can we've tested pretty far back.
That's great. Yeah, I would say if it's a Supported version of QlikView should be covered. Okay, next question. Are there any size limitations for moving to cloud?
Yeah, so as I addressed, you know, it's going to depend a little bit on your subscription tier. You may require moving it from personal space to a large app shared space or manage space if it's too big before doing a kind of a manual binary reload of that QVW. Otherwise, if you don't have those, if it falls above your tier amount, which can range anywhere between 5 Gb and 15 Gb of base RAM, depending on the tier, that said, you can always still migrate without reloading first, then get the reloads working in the load script in the cloud app. And then because you're able to iterate on top of apps in the converter tool without doing a reload, you will be able to continue to iterate over the app in that sense, even if you weren't able to do the automatic reload that we showed before.
That's great. Next question. Will this help create master items in the tenant?
The tool itself will not create master items for you. But the way that this can help is that you are able to use in cloud Qlik Automate to automatically create master items in applications. You actually use that output Excel file that we talked about have Qlik Automate point to that Excel file and automatically create those master dimensions and master measures using Qlik Automate.
I believe there's a template there for there is a template for using it too.
Yeah. When you try to create a new Automation, you can select a template and one of the templates is importing master items through an Excel file.
Fantastic. And another one of the advantages of having Qlik Cloud is Automations.
Exactly.
And last question we have time for today. How does this work in conjunction with the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool?
Yeah, that's a great question, Troy. So the QlikView to Qlik Sense tool is a single executable essentially just double-click and go and it can convert your QlikView applications that you point it to into Qlik Sense and then actually publish them to Qlik Cloud. What it's not aimed to do is to work on the broader cloud migration. You may have QlikView, you may also have Qlik Sense. You're organizing your QlikView applications and you're also organizing your Qlik Sense applications and streams. You have different users. All of the other elements and components of your QlikView or Qlik Sense environments do get migrated using the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool. So what we're seeing and positioning here is the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter. The visible layer at the top does your QlikView front-end applications, your layouts, your expressions, the styling and the visualizations. And if you are looking for more of a foundational Migration Tool that can migrate all of the other components like the users and your security and your scheduling, then the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool is your tool of choice. Going forward, what we look to have in a future release of the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool is embedding and integrating the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter. So we'll be seamless for you whether you're migrating Qlik Sense or QlikView to use one single tool as the Qlik Analytics Migration Tool and move across not just the QlikView applications converted with everything that the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool can do cause it's using the same thing but also all of the other components too. Now this isn't to say that we will not have the QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool available that will still exist as a standalone for you to use in more tactical scenarios or for you to use as your main conversion tool.
Sav and Adam, thank you so much for going through all the details here and actually demonstrating how easy it is and how powerful a tool this is. I think it'll be really helpful for people. Thank you.
Well, thank you Troy for hosting and thank you everyone for listening in on this demonstration and this Techspert Talk.
Yeah, thank you Troy and thank you Adam and thanks everyone for joining today. So I just wanted to summarize how this helps you. The QlikView to Qlik Sense converter tool reduces the complexity. It lowers the barrier for you to move to Qlik Cloud and also just to convert to Qlik Sense. It can accelerate any ongoing conversion projects you have today. It's available to download now from the Qlik product downloads. You can begin to consolidate your QlikView estates and infrastructure. It's also scalable to meet your needs. And all this to say is it can quickly make you start using all of the AI capabilities that is available in Qlik Cloud. Those applications can even move with data and then you can enhance and improve it with AI going forward. Thanks everyone.
Great. Thank you everyone. We hope you enjoyed this session and special thanks to Adam and Sav for presenting. We always appreciate getting experts like Sav and Adam to share with us. Here's our legal disclaimer. And thank you once again. Have a great rest of your day.