E-mergo Tools Bundle for Qlik Sense

By choosing Qlik Sense, users get a BI platform that can do more than what you find out of the box. Qlik Sense is surrounded by an ecosystem of extensions and themes that expand the software's functionality. To do exactly that, E-mergo now presents the ‘E-mergo Tools Bundle’: a set of extensions that helps us and our customers get more out of Qlik Sense.

Why this bundle?

Developments at Qlik never stand still. Even so, building a good dashboard sometimes calls for things that are not possible in Qlik Sense by default. For several customers, we have already developed extensions that made such specific requirements possible. With the E-mergo Tools Bundle, we have now created a set of extensions that meets a number of basic needs of our own consultants and our customers.

A second reason to develop this bundle was to further deepen our knowledge of Qlik Sense. The product contains a large number of APIs that developers can use to harness the power of Qlik Sense in previously unimagined ways. The E-mergo Tools Bundle uses some of these APIs, allowing us to make our consultants' work simpler and more efficient. We now know more about these possibilities and can create even more value with this great BI platform.

The E-mergo Tools Bundle

The E-mergo Tools Bundle is a set of five extensions, each briefly explained below. A detailed description of each extension can be found in the documentation (included in the bundle download below).

1 E-mergo App Object Importer

This extension lets you copy elements from other dashboards into the current dashboard. It can therefore only be used while developing a dashboard and has no visual element for the dashboard user. The following ‘app objects’ can be imported:

• Sheets
• Master items. This applies to dimensions, measures and visualizations alike.
• Alternate states
• Variables
• These are only copied for the current user of the dashboard.

Although it is technically possible, copying elements from a dashboard is currently not supported by Qlik Sense. That makes this extension very powerful and a godsend in many scenarios where a developer wants to reuse elements from other apps.

2 E-mergo Buttons

With Qlik's Dashboard bundle, Qlik Sense users have had a button visualization for some time now. It lets you perform actions after the dashboard user clicks the button. In our view its capabilities are still somewhat limited, so we built our own button. The E-mergo Buttons extension has a large functional overlap with the existing button visualization, but adds a number of distinctive features. The most important are:

• The ability to show multiple buttons in a single visualization. This lets you make better use of the space in an object and use the buttons more effectively as a navigation menu.
• The colour of each button can be set from a preset, using the colour picker or with an expression.
• Each button can be shown conditionally based on an expression.
• The set of actions is more extensive:
  • Select adjacent values. This lets you select the next or previous value of a field, always taking the currently selected value into account. An example is ‘paging’ through years or months in the data model.
  • Select pareto values. This lets you select field values that match the pareto set belonging to a chosen measure expression. This functionality already existed in QlikView, but not yet in Qlik Sense.
  • Start reload. If the right permissions are in place, this lets you reload the data model of the current dashboard.
  • Start reload task. If the right permissions are in place, this lets you start a reload task. This is not available in Qlik Sense Desktop.
  • Set theme. This lets you change the theme of the current session in the dashboard. An example is letting the user choose a colour scheme adapted for colour-blind users or, for instance, a Dark Theme.
• Instead of a static set of buttons, you can choose dynamic mode to generate buttons automatically based on an expression. The generated set of buttons then uses values found by the expression (labels, colour code, etc.) and shares the same action type.
• The navigation options have been extended with an option to navigate to another dashboard and sheet.

3 E-mergo Divider

This visualization displays a simple line. It is used as a divider between different visualizations in the dashboard, so you can separate left from right or top from bottom. In the extension settings you can define the orientation, width and colour of the line.

4 E-mergo Table Inspector

When developing a dashboard, developers regularly want to see all the fields and the structure of a table in the data model. This extension provides that insight by presenting the complete table once you choose the data table you want, without having to select all the individual fields. Switching to other data tables takes two clicks, you can remove or add columns in the table, and changes to the data model are synchronized automatically. All actions are available in the extension's context menu. Converting it to a regular table works just like any other visualization. Our own consultants are very enthusiastic about this extension, because doing this for different data tables used to be a slow, manual job.

5 E-mergo Triggers

This extension lets you perform actions in response to events in the dashboard. Because only the actions matter, the extension has no visual element for the dashboard user. The set of actions and navigation options is the same as that of the E-mergo Buttons extension. What makes it special, however, is the moment at which these actions are performed: not by clicking a button, but when one of the following happens:

• A field selection is made
• A field selection is cleared
• Selections are made so that an expression comparison evaluates to true
• A variable's value changes
• A sheet is entered
• A number of seconds has elapsed

With these options you can, for example, apply selections when a sheet is entered. Another example is automatically cycling between sheets by using the next-sheet navigation option after 60 seconds have passed. Yet another scenario is automatically stepping through a time dimension, such as year or month, so you can show how the data changes without having to make the selections yourself. The possibilities of this extension are greater than we can foresee right now, so we are curious to see what our consultants and other users will create with it!

Terms

The extensions in this bundle are offered free of charge to E-mergo customers. The extensions are also included in Qlik Branch, where the Qlik community shares extensions and knowledge. The code of the extensions has been published on GitHub. Anyone can download the extensions there, and with an account you can also report and discuss bugs. The MIT licence that comes with each extension allows users to use and modify the code as they see fit. It also releases E-mergo from any liability for damage that may result from using the extensions.

Because the E-mergo Tools Bundle is used by our own consultants and customers, E-mergo guarantees that the extensions will, as far as possible, be maintained to keep working with every new version of Qlik Sense. Requests for new features can be submitted to support@e-mergo.nl, but E-mergo reserves the right to decide at its own discretion whether to act on them.

The future of the bundle

With the E-mergo Tools Bundle, we have created a set of extensions that meets a number of basic needs of our consultants and customers. Because we control the development of these extensions ourselves, we can respond quickly to bugs or urgently needed enhancements when necessary. This bundle may grow in the future, or features may be added. Although we still have a few ideas on the shelf, we don't have a detailed roadmap. Moreover, we don't plan to build full data visualizations that extend the visualization capabilities of Qlik Sense. For customers who do need that, E-mergo has partnered with VizLib, which offers a complete package of additional visualizations and extensions for Qlik Sense.

Would you like to extend the capabilities of Qlik Sense using extensions? For questions about what VizLib can do for your organization or about building a specific solution, get in touch with one of our account managers.