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· By HeyData team

Lesser-known Qlik Sense functions and keywords: a series

The Qlik Sense script and expression language has several hundred functions. A handful are enough day to day: Sum(), If(), ApplyMap(), Peek(). Others stay in the shadows, although they solve in one line a problem that otherwise needs a detour. And a few are well known but misunderstood: they come up again and again in Qlik Community questions.

This series covers them one by one. Each article starts from a concrete problem, explains how things work with diagrams, points out the pitfalls, and ends with a script to paste into an empty app to try it out.

How we chose the topics

We picked functions and keywords that meet one of these three criteria.

  • Little known. Because they are recent, like Window(), released late 2023, or rarely documented, like Semantic.
  • Often misunderstood. Judging by questions that come up again and again in the Qlik Community.
  • Useful in projects. Based on our consulting and training experience.

Each article is based on the official Qlik help and, where relevant, on the Design Blog and the Community. Sources are listed at the end of each article. Texts, diagrams and examples are by HeyData.

Published articles

Chart expressions

  1. Aggr(): the virtual table and its four pitfalls.
  2. Advanced set analysis: P(), E(), set operators, expression searches.
  3. Dollar-sign expansion: variables, parameters, decimal separator.
  4. Inter-record functions: variance, running total and moving average in charts.

Script

  1. Window(): group averages, moving averages and running totals in the script, without reducing rows.
  2. CrossTable: unpivoting a cross table, with one month per column, at load time.
  3. Generic: turning attribute-value data into real fields.
  4. Semantic: moving from parent to child, in one click, in a tree or a graph.
  5. Merge, Add, Replace: partial reload and applying a change log.
  6. Dual(): the text-and-number nature of values, and its pitfall.

Extras

  1. FirstSortedValue, Concat, Only, Rank: four aggregations that return a name, a list or a rank.
  2. ValueLoop and ValueList: dimensions that do not exist in the data.
  3. Class, Match, WildMatch, Pick: banding and mapping without nested If().

These topics are part of our Qlik Sense Developer training. For a script review or support, get in touch.