Chapter 4. Managing and Securing QlikView Documents

The role of a QlikView Server is to serve QlikView Documents to users. Of course, you will probably not want all of your documents served to all users, so you will need a way to secure your system.

In addition to document security, there are other server-side settings that are important to know for both server performance and user experience. We also need to know how to perform an automated reload if we don't have a QlikView Publisher in place. These are the topics we'll be covering in this chapter:

• Securing QlikView Documents

  • By license

  • Section Access

  • NTFS Access Control List (ACL)

  • QlikView Document Metadata Service (DMS)

• Other Document properties

  • Document Server settings

  • Document metadata

  • QlikView Server reload tasks

• Using Event Driven Execution (EDX)

Securing QlikView Documents

Making documents available to the correct users can be handled in several different ways, depending on your implementation and license structure. These methods are not mutually exclusive and you may choose to implement a combination of them.

By license

If you only have named Document users, you can restrict access to documents by simply not granting users a license. If users do not have a Document license for a particular document, they may be able to see that document in AccessPoint, but will not be able to open it.

You will need to turn off any automatic allocation of licenses for both Document licenses and Named User licenses, or the system will simply override your security by allocating an available license and giving the user access to that document.

This only works for Document license users. The Named User license holders can't be locked out of a document this way as they have a license that allows them to open any number of documents, so they cannot be restricted...

Other Document properties

Up to this point, we have looked at Document license administration and Document authorization. Now we will look at the other tabs that make up the Document properties in QMC.

Document Server settings

The Document Server settings tab defines how the document interacts with QlikView Server and users on the server:

Server Objects (collaboration)

Collaboration is the facility in QlikView Server that allows users to create their own content, such as list boxes, charts, and so on.

Tip

Collaboration can be turned off globally for all Server documents in the System | QVS settings | Documents tab, by deselecting the Allow Server Objects option.

On a document-by-document basis, you can also turn it on for All Authenticated Users or Named Users. The named users are managed by the same dialog that we used to read details from the DSC.

We can also use this screen to view the list of objects that have been created by different users, and remove them if required (a valuable troubleshooting...

Using Event Driven Execution (EDX)

We have seen in the previous section that we can use the QlikView Server to schedule reloads on different kinds of triggers. Without having QlikView Publisher, we can only have one trigger per reload. This is generally enough for most purposes, but some organizations may have a requirement for more flexible reload schedules.

One of the triggers, Event Driven Execution (EDX), is not time based. This trigger allows a web service call to be made to the QlikView Management Service (Service wsdl is http://servername:4799/QMS/Service) to start the task. A password can also be specified here. This allows external applications to trigger your QlikView reloads.

Not all of us are developers who can run an application to make web service calls. Luckily, someone has created a command-line executable and made this available for free download from the QlikView Community at http://community.qlikview.com/docs/DOC-2650.

For those who like taking things apart to see how it...

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at several ways of securing QlikView Documents—by license, using Section Access, utilizing NTFS ACLs, and implementing QlikView's DMS authorization. We have also looked at other Document properties such as Server settings, Document metadata, and how to configure a QlikView Server reload task. We have also discussed how EDX works and how it can be implemented.

In the next chapter, we will see how to implement QlikView in an Enterprise situation by installing QlikView Server components on separate servers.