Saturday, April 5, 2014

Inline Load with Where Clause


You wouldn’t ordinarily use a Where clause with an inline load… after all, if you didn’t want all of the rows why bother typing them? But, as an example, I had a project two weeks ago where an inline load with a Where clause helped solve a problem. It was a QlikView document that could load data from any one of several dozen companies. The data included a company code but not the company name or any other friendly details for me to use in the document.
I coded an inline load with a row for each of the possible companies. In the loadscript, after loading the company data, I coded an extract of the company code from the data and stored it in a variable named var_cmp_code.

The inline load, simplified here, looked something like this:
COMPANY_INFO:
Load * inline
[cmp_code, company_name, company_industry
BA, Boeing, Aerospace
CCC, Chesterfield Coal Co, Mining and Minerals
LPL, London Pastry Ltd, Stale Biscuits]
Where cmp_code = '$(var_cmp_code)';

Since each load of the document is loading data for one company, the Where clause on the inline load makes it load one row only and each field name, therefore, has only one value. That allowed me to use company_name or any of the other field names in chart titles and text boxes. For example, I used a text expression in a chart title like this:  ='Future Health Care Risk by Year for ' & company_name
Remember that an inline load is like any other load except that the data is typed directly into the loadscript instead of being loaded from a separate file or database. In addition to a Where clause, you could code a While, Autogenerate, mapping table, Concatenate, Qualify, or the various types of joins available in a loadscript.

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