Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Combining Bookmarks


I was called to help with a situation last week where one person, working on a pricing project, had analyzed some data and identified a group of materials that would be needed later. The materials were selected and a bookmark was defined.

There was a second person working on a seemingly unrelated marketing project, who also identified a group of materials, selected them, and defined a bookmark for the selection.
The problem was that there was a need to combine the materials selections from the two separate bookmarks. There’s no good way to really combine two entire bookmarks and create a third bookmark out of them. But, when you’re interested in the selections for a single field as the people in my example were interested in the materials field, then there is a technique for combining the selections.

To illustrate the technique, assume that the first bookmark is named BK1 and the second bookmark is named BK2. First, get both of the bookmarks into the same document. An easy way to do that is export the bookmarks from the documents where they were created and then import one or both of them into a second document. In the document containing both bookmarks you will need a listbox for the materials field or a multibox that contains the materials field.
Click on the materials listbox or on the little black triangle next to the materials on the multibox. Then, begin to type this expression:

=sum( { BK1 + BK2 } 1 )


As soon as you type the equal sign, QlikView knows that you are entering an expression. It looks like an expression you might use in a chart but we’re going to use it here to select materials. The syntax is a set analysis expression – it can be a little tricky with the parentheses and curly braces but it is worth the trouble when you need it. As you type the expression a number of materials will be listed with a white background – those represent a combination of all of the materials from both of the bookmarks. Finish the expression by hitting the Enter key and the materials are now selected and show up with a green background.

A similar expression could be used to combine the materials from a bookmark with the currently selected materials in a document. For that you would follow the instructions as above but type this expression:

=sum( { $ + BK1 } 1 )


If you wanted to select only the materials that appears in both bookmarks (the intersection), then type this expression:

=sum( { BK1 * BK2 } 1 )


And, finally, if you wanted to select the materials that are both in your current selection and in the bookmark then type this expression:

=sum( { $ * BK1 } 1 )


★ ★ ★

2 comments:

Pablo said...

This kind of feature show us how Qlikview is so powerful.

Unknown said...

How can i intersect just the fields i want