Selecting Listbox Values Containing Either of Two Different Pieces of Text

Last week a coworker had a document loaded with data from a database job log table. It was over a million rows of log data that various batch jobs had written into. She wanted to select the rows that represented the start time of jobs and also the rows that represented the end time of jobs. Either one by itself would be easy. We knew that the LOGMESSAGE column contains the text ‘JOB START [‘ for log messages posted by jobs when they start up and the column contains the text ‘FINISH STATUS [‘ for messages posted by jobs when they end. To select either of those types of rows you would just click a listbox for the LOGMESSAGE column and start typing the text and QlikView would automatically select the rows. But, selecting both start message and end messages – that is different, how to do that?

The answer is to use an advanced search expression. For this example, you click on the LOGMESSAGE listbox and then start typing this:  =wildmatch(LOGMESSAGE,' *JOB START [*','*FINISH STATUS [*')

As soon as you type the equal sign, QlikView knows you are entering an advanced search expression. QlikView then tests the WildMatch function for each possible value of LOGMESSAGE and if the function is true then the column value is shown in the listbox and when you click [enter] the values are selected. It worked great for our log data problem- all of the start and end log messages were selected and shown in the chart along with their job start timestamps and job end timestamps.

The asterisks in the WildMatch expression are wild card characters that represent any series of characters. We could have added other wildcard matching strings too if we needed them. For example, if the job end messages had two different text layouts then we could have used the matching text to select both types of end messages. Despite the fact that the WildMatch expression contains the column name, LOGMESSAGE, it could be used with any of the columns or fields in the document and it would select the values that are associated with the LOGMESSAGE start and end messages.

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