Friday, August 19, 2011

Looking Inside a Bookmark Without Opening It




This blog post comes from a question asked on the QlikCommunity forum. The question was how do you look at the selections inside a bookmark without actually selecting and activating the bookmark?

I had never thought about how you might do that. It is not difficult to list out the possible values for a single field based on a bookmark whether the bookmark has been opened or not. For example, for a bookmark named Feb_Sales and a field named ITEM you can put a text expression like this into a text object or chart title:

=concat({Feb_Sales} distinct ITEM, ', ')
That will give you a list of the ITEM values separated by commas. Note that it is a list of Possible values, it will only be the Selected values if the bookmark includes a selection on that particular field.

This technique can be used to give the user a peek into the selected or possible field values in the bookmarks; perhaps helping a user decide which bookmark should be used.


You can also apply the selection to the ITEM field without opening the Feb_Sales bookmark. Go to a listbox or multibox entry for ITEM and type this:

=count({Feb_Sales} 1 )


and that will select the ITEM values (if none of the ITEM values exists in your current document then it will appear that all values have been selected).


If there is a field normally associated with ITEM then you can select that. For example, if the field Product_Category is normally associated with ITEM then go to a listbox or multibox entry for Product_Category and type that same bit of text and it will automatically select the Product_Category values associated with the Feb_Sales bookmark without opening the bookmark!

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