Chapter 2. Seeing is Believing
As we've seen in the previous chapter, HighCloud Airlines has a particular need: to be able to analyze the US airline market from different perspectives, be able to create reports that help them better understand what the situation is, and evaluate if entering that market is a good strategy. Sara took the risk and showed the CEO what they could potentially do with QlikView and he was impressed by what he saw. After their meeting, Sara was asked to arrange a formal proof-of-concept session.
This chapter will not only follow a QlikView team working on the Seeing is Believing (SiB) phase of the pre-sale process, along with the HighCloud Airlines executives evaluating it, but it will also help us learn some basic concepts about developing QlikView documents.
So, let's get our hands on the subject and start creating. There is no better way to learn than by doing, and this chapter will be the initial platform on which we will base our QlikView development experience...
A SiB (an acronym for Seeing is Believing) is the proof-of-concept session in which, during the pre-sale process, the technical capabilities of the QlikView software are demonstrated to the prospective customer. The way we demo QlikView at this stage usually involves creating a targeted QlikView document that uses the customer's actual data in a limited amount of time.
That's why, in this chapter, we will build a QlikView document based on real and useful data, focused on HighCloud Airlines' line of business. The dataset we will use is publicly available and covers information about airline operations in the US. The original data files have been downloaded from The Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the United States website (http://transtats.bts.gov), and have been pre-processed so that we can focus on the main concepts this chapter is intended to outline. As the book evolves, we will introduce more advanced concepts so that, in the end, we are able to work with the original...
Before we start, we need to make sure we have everything we'll need throughout the chapter.
Since the previous chapter covered the QlikView Desktop installation process, we assume that it is already installed on your machine by now. If not, please take a moment to install it before continuing.
Setting up the folder structure
We will create a Windows folder structure with which we'll work throughout the book. This set of folders will help us organize the various files we'll be using and arrange them by the specific role these files play in our project.
Note
The files provided along with the book are already structured with the folders we need. If you have already copied the original files, you can skip the outlined process.
A typical QlikView deployment scenario will include different types of files, but for now we'll just focus on two of them:
The source data files
The QlikView document
Tip
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt...
We can think of a QlikView document as being composed of two major elements:
The dataset that the user analyzes: This is the backend of our QlikView document and includes all of the source tables needed to build a data model, as well as the logic to update its source data.
The user interface through which the user analyzes the data: This is the frontend of our analytical app and includes the objects contained in he document (like a listbox to make selections and filter data), or the charts and tables used to visualize the information.
In hand with the elements described above, we will break the construction of our QlikView document into two major phases:
However, before moving on to create our QlikView document, we should have a clear understanding of the business-side requirements for our app, so the construction and design phases are fully focused towards meeting those requirements.
We have just started creating and building analytical applications with QlikView. Although the data model we used was simple to build, we covered the basic concepts a developer should consider when designing it.
The main objective of this chapter was to show you the basics of QlikView development from the design perspective, to create basic objects, and to change different properties to make them more functional.
This chapter helped you learn how to load source tables from QVDs, to associate different source tables to create a data model, and to identify dimensions and expressions in the context of a QlikView document.
It also showed you how to create a user interface with user controls to filter data and make selections. Finally, we learned how to create charts and tables that have a high degree of interactivity.
In the next chapter we will learn how we can load data from different data sources.
