How to exclude values in Set Analysis

Every Friday at Bitmetric we’re posting a new Qlik certification practice question to our LinkedIn company page. Last Friday we asked the following Qlik Data Architect certification practice question about excluding values in Set Analysis:

Quite an impressive amount of answers this time around. And that is certainly not to our surprise since set analysis is the staple (and maybe the bane) of most Qlik developers.

The correct answer is C.

The trick in this question is the fact that the end user still wants to make selections. As we all know, set analysis works by sort of making selections within the aggregation itself. Based on the values in the set condition, Qlik evaluates this as a selection on chart level. As in the question, we tell Qlik to make a selection in the Country field. Keeping that in mind and lets evaluate what both statements do.

The difference lies in the placement of the ‘-‘ minus sign. We should view the ‘=’ sign as an operator which selects or actually replaces current selections. For example the expression Sum(<Country = {Belgium}>} Sales) will select only Belgium in the country field. Whatever other selection you will make, it will still only show the Sales for that condition.

Now let’s place a minus in front of that to make the expression Sum(<Country -= {Belgium}>} Sales). This will make Qlik exclude Belgium from your selections. By effect, this will show all possible selections in the country field, except Belgium. Therefor it is still possible to make selections, however, Belgium will never show up in the result of the expression.

Referring to the example above we see that Belgium and Denmark are both selection. We see that the total result should be 180. However in the ‘-=’ set analysis we will only see the 80 of Denmark. Belgium is excluded.

But what happens with ‘=-‘? In that case we tell Qlik to make selections in the Country field, for everything except Belgium. This means that however we make selections, we will always see all sales, expect for Belgium.

This is proven by the fact that the minus and equal sign are not needed to be written together; ‘-=’ is a single operator, where ‘=-‘ are in fact two, the equal sign telling Qlik to make selections and the – sign to select everything except Belgium.

That’s it for this week! And remember. If you would like to know more about set analysis? Have a look at Outer Sets or Literal vs Search Strings.