Month: March 2011

Collaboration Metadata And More

IMPORTANT NOTE

You may need to edit the CONNECT string to provide the full file path to the DLL. The default location in QlikView 11.2 SR3 is on the C: drive – Program Files\QlikView

An edited CONNECT string would look like this:

CUSTOM CONNECT TO “Provider=C:\Program Files\QlikView\QvsAdminDataProvider.dll;host=corp-qlikview-t;XUserId=****;XPassword=****;”;

Thanks to Ronnie Taborn for this solution!

 

 

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a nifty feature in the QlikView version 10 to pull metadata from the repository into a QVW.

The metadata are related to applications (QVW documents) in AccessPoint and the server objects that users can create. Specifically:

  • Documents – names, sizes, AccessPoint properties
  • Document attributes – if you assign custom attributes in the QVS Management Console
  • Collaboration (a.k.a. “server”) objects – creator, types, properties

These metadata are not available in the Ops Monitor app (as far as I know), so this new feature is more than just a convenience.

 

Creating the script

Adding these fields to the load script is super-simple, thanks to a new option in the datasource selection drop-down menu – QvsAdminDataProvider.dll (32)

 

  1. Choose the QvsAdminDataProvider.dll (32) from the drop-down menu
  2. Click the “Connect” button to add the connect string into your script
  3. Click Select to bring up the Select Wizard
  4. Choose all fields from all tables and include the Preceding Load option

A few tweaks…

I made a couple of small tweaks to the script for convenience:

Rather than expressing the document size (DocumentList.FileSize) in bytes, I converted it to kilobytes using this code:
round(num(replace(FileSize,'.',''), '#') / 1024, 1) AS [File Size (kB)]

 

And I plucked the username out of the CollaborationMetadata.OwnerName:
subField(CollaborationOwner, '\', 2) AS OwnerName

 

Now reload the script! Your data model should look like this:

 

Using the objects

The simplest use case is to create table boxes and a few selectors. The Document List and Collaboration Objects are well-suited for tabular display. Here I’ve done a little renaming and formatting:

 

What else could we do with this?

Now we can start having fun! With these new metadata available for collaboration objects, we can measure aspects of our QlikView program such as:

  • Which applications get customized the most? (i.e. the most server objects created)
  • Which users are creating the most server objects?
  • What percent of our user base is sharing their server objects?

Here are just a few visualizations to serve as examples:

(this would be more meaningful with more than one user!! 🙂 )

 

Hope these examples get you thinking about ways to incorporate these metadata into the monitoring and improvement of your QlikView program.

Keep on Qlikin’

Bill

 

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