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hic
Former Employee
Former Employee

Already when we were selling QlikView 3, we had received a fairly advanced customer demand from pharmaceutical companies. We solved it. And here’s how we did it. But first some background:

 

In the pharmaceutical industry, the sales reps are not the ones that sell the products. Instead, they visit physicians and demonstrate one or several products. Days, weeks or months later, the physician prescribe the demonstrated medicine to a patient, and the actual sale takes place when the patient buys the drug at a pharmacy.

 

The demand on QlikView was to show pharmacy sales data, not only per physician, but also per physician visited once, twice, three times, etc. In other words, the physicians should be grouped by number of visits, and this number should be used as dimension in a QlikView chart. A nested aggregation.

 

For QlikView 4 we had a solution for this. Well, solution is perhaps not the right word… There was a kludgy, hidden feature with which you could use a count of a field as dimension. Internally it was called the Doctor Controls.

 

First you had to enable this feature in the list of hidden settings.

 

Easter Egg 04.png

 

Then you could create your chart: Count(Visit) per Physician. After that, you needed to enable the “Display Result Count” in the chart:

 

Properties Small.png

 

The left graph shows graph as-is – without the “Display Result Count” enabled. It shows the distinct count of visits per physician, just as the dimension and expression of the chart are defined.

 

Graphs.png

 

But, by turning on the “Display Result Count”, the chart transformed into the right graph: The displayed dimension was now the equivalent to an Aggr(Count(Visit),Physician) and the displayed expression was Count(Physician).

 

We solved a customer’s problem at the time, but this was not a good, long term solution. And it was nothing we wanted to support. Instead we wanted a general solution for nested aggregations. Six years later – after much thinking – Håkan (the Inventor) came up with the Aggr() function for QlikView 7. It is a general function for nested aggregations that made the Doctors’ Special redundant.

 

Easter Egg 11.png

 

But like a relic from the past, the Doctor Controls setting can still today be found in the QlikView 11 list of hidden settings. It doesn’t affect anything - I hope.

 

HIC

 

Further reading on the Qlik history:

A Historical Odyssey: Quality - Learning - Interaction - Knowledge

A Historical Odyssey: QlikView 1

8 Comments
Not applicable

" it doesn't affect anything - I hope"  hahahaha

Great story Henric, keep them coming!

Best Regards,

Rodrigo

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1,202 Views
Not applicable

I agree.

The story is great, but these line is the best:  "it doesn't affect anything - I hope"

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paulyeo11
Master
Master

Hi HIC , can you write some stroy about the QV founder ? i think it will be very interesting to know a bit of him. such a smart person.

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cotiso_hanganu
Partner - Creator III
Partner - Creator III

Hi Henric,

Even I believe myself a QlikView veteran (10years+), I didn't know anything about the list of hidden settings and I still don't know how can I see them. Perhaps a new blog entry on this matter ? Or at least just a hint on how to access them ?


Tx a lot,

Cotiso

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1,202 Views
MK_QSL
MVP
MVP

To Cotiso Haganu,

QlikView - Help - About QlikView  - right click on QlikView Symbol at bottom left...

You will get Hidden Settings...

1,202 Views
sparur
Specialist II
Specialist II

Unfortunately, it doesn't work anymore

I have tried to set this parameter to 0, but I can't find "Display Result Count" option in Properties dialog.

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hic
Former Employee
Former Employee

Luckily it doesn't work anymore! We removed this feature when we introduced the Aggr() function: The Aggr() can do everything the DRC could do - and more...

HIC

893 Views
Anonymous
Not applicable

Yes, I've used it a lot, until aggr() and calculated dimensions were introduced.

893 Views