Searching within selections

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 searching within selections:

Sometimes you are put on the spot as a developer and have to come up with a quick solution. When that happens, experience and broad knowledge are vital tools to have. Knowing which possibilities there are for search selections is one of them:

The correct answer is D.

The expressions search

Using expressions within the selection pane in Qlik is a powerful and convenient way to quickly find and select specific data points. This can be especially useful when you are working with large datasets or complex visualizations, as it allows you to quickly and easily focus on the information that is most relevant to you.

The correct way to use the expressions search is to start with an equal sign as operator (=). In this question we want to select all customers with sales exceeding 10.000 units. We start with the equal sign and then the expression =Sum(Units)>10000 on the Customer field. This tells Qlik to evaluate the Customer field based on this aggregation and select all associated field values from Customer.

If we refer to the figure below, we can see that we have a total of 44 distinct customers, with 409.500 units sold in total.

Now we input the expression search into the Customer selection pane:

After pressing enter the selection is made. Resulting in the 17 customers we see in the figure below. This selection can now be added to a bookmark.

The nice thing of storing expression searches as a bookmark is that the bookmark is dynamic. As we can see in the bookmark itself:

There is a set expression on the Customer field, selecting all customers where the sum of units is bigger then 10.000.

To illustrate this, we add some sales to the dashboard for Bob Smith. As we see in the first figure above, Bob only sold 300 units. This is now changed to 30.000 units. After reloading the data and selecting the bookmark, we get the following result:

The expression search is most effective when used in fields associated to the value you are looking for. For example. You could also make a selection on the Units field:

By typing >10000 we do a numeric search of bigger than 10000 on the field Units. It immediately shows 30000 as the only possible value. After pressing enter to make the selection we end up with the following result:

Here we have our friend Bob as the only result, since he is the only one with a units amount more than 10000. Since there is no aggregation done, this is not the result we are looking for.

Overall, using expressions within the selection pane in Qlik is a powerful and convenient way to quickly and easily filter your data and focus on the information that is most relevant to you. Whether you are a data analyst, a business user, or just someone who wants to quickly explore their data, using expressions within the selection pane can help you get the most out of your Qlik apps.

Other search selection options

There are obviously more options to make search selections. For example, just entering information in a Name field being the most common. We will list the names here, but not discuss them in depth:

• Text Search (Using text to search)
• Fuzzy Search (Using the tilde (~) character to find inexact matches)
• Numeric Search (Values, possible in combination with symbols like greater than, less then, etc etc)
• Expression Search (See this blogpost)
• Compound Search (Use search operators to combine searches)

That’s it for this week!

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