Hints and tips on using QViewer for inspecting resident tables in QlikView

Three years ago I wrote "How to look inside resident tables at any point of loading script". This technique proved to be quite successful and efficient, and was praised by many prominent QlikView developers since then.

This post is a round-up of some best practices of using QViewer for inspecting resident tables in QlikView, collected over the last 3 years:

Here is the most recent variant of the INSPECT subroutine:

SUB Inspect (T)
    // let's add some fault tolerance
    LET NR = NoOfRows('$(T)');
    IF len('$(NR)')>0 THEN
        // Table exists, let's view it
        STORE $(T) into [$(QvWorkPath)\~$(T).qvd] (qvd);
        EXECUTE "C:\<pathToQViewer>\QViewer.exe" "$(QvWorkPath)\~$(T).qvd";
        EXECUTE cmd.exe /c del /q "$(QvWorkPath)\~$(T).qvd";
    ELSE
        //Table doesn't exist. Let's display a messagebox with a warning
        _MsgBox:
        LOAD MsgBox('Table $(T) doesn' & chr(39) & 't exist. Nothing to inspect.', 'Warning', 'OK', 'ICONEXCLAMATION') as X AutoGenerate 1;
        Drop Table _MsgBox;
    ENDIF
    // Namespace cleanup
    SET NR=;
ENDSUB

Installer of the next version of QViewer will be creating a registry key with path to QViewer, so the subroutine will be able to use the registry key to get location of qviewer.exe instead of hardcoded file path (kudos to Matthew Fryer for the suggestion).

INSPECT is quite helpful in verifying joins for correctness. For this, insert CALL INSPECT twice -- once before a join, and once after it. This will allow you to see whether the resulting table has more rows after the join than before, and check if the join actually appended anything, i.e. if appended columns actually have some data in them.

To find duplicates in a column -- double-click the column header for a listbox with unique values in that column, and then click Count in that list. On first click QViewer will sort values in descending order thus showing duplicate entries (which have counts > 1) at the top of the list. Checking a primary key for duplicates after a join can help detecting wrong joins.

To find duplicate rows in a table -- click "Morph It" to open the table in EasyMorph, and then apply "Keep Duplicates" transformation. You can also filter rows, if you apply "Filter" or "Filter by expression" transformation.

When you deal with wide tables that have many columns, you might need to find specific column. Press F5 to open Table Metadata, and then sort field names in alphabetical order. Another common use case for Table Metadata is checking whether columns have values of expected type. For instance if a column is expected to have only numeric values, its "Text count" should be 0.

To find a value in a column -- double-click the column header to open a list of unique values, then use the search field above the list. To locate the searched value in the main table, simply double-click the value in the list. Press F3 to find next match in the main table.

Currently, the search feature is somewhat obscured (as rightfully pointed by some users). We will be introducing a more convenient full table search in QViewer v2.3 coming out in June. Subscribe to our mailing list on easyqlik.com to get a notification when it happens.