Friday 13 February 2015

QlikView Addict CodeBox merging with QlikView Components

The QlikView Addict CodeBox (QVACB) isn't a thing most people will be familiar with; the reason why will become clear as you read on. Several years ago now, I had some time on my hands and so I set about collating into a single package, all the reusable and useful bits of QlikView code I had lying around. The end result was QVACB. My intention was that at some point I would release it so that other QlikView developers could make use it, but maintaining my other released tools (such as the syntax highlighting) kept getting in the way. And so QVACB has been sat on the virtual shelf, only ever getting as far as being released to a handful of QlikView consultants/developers in something loosely resembling an alpha trial. I'm sad to say it hasn't even been updated in well over a year.

Recently I started to receive a few messages from people asking me to fix issues or add features to QVACB. After a little digging, it transpired that QVACB was being used by more people than I had thought and in some cases even in production solutions. This made me consider what the best way would be to go about releasing it properly. However, the last thing I wanted to do was release something which I never got the time to maintain properly.

Many of you will be familiar with QlikView Components (QVC), another QlikView code library  which was produced by Rob Wunderlich. Rob is a very well respected and highly experienced independent QlikView consultant based in the US, who also produces the well known QlikView Cookbook blog. QlikView Components has a lot of similar abilities to QVACB and so it made sense to me that combining the two would not only provide QlikView developers with a single library to use, but also mean managing and updating it could be a joint effort. After talking it through with Rob he agreed and so I'm very happy to announce that we have begun the process of merging the two libraries.



In the process of the merge it is inevitable that we must define a standardised syntax and so unfortunately we have had to make a decision as to which libraries syntax to keep going forward. Because QlikView Components has been formally released for several years and as a result has a much larger existing user base, it is the obvious choice that we avoid changing its syntax as much as possible. And so we will be merging the additional functionality from QVACB into QVC (Acronym overload I know). This will mean that QVACB ceases to exist and that those people who are using it will need to migrate their code to use QlikView Components. I'd like to think that the benefits of having the additional abilities of QVC and knowing that it is supported and maintained going forward, will far outweigh the hassle of making the switch.

Over the coming weeks we'll be busy working away on the migration and will bring you the first new version of QlikView Components containing merged QVACB features as soon as possible. Of course I'll post here a soon as a release is made. You can also follow the progress on the GitHub project.

And finally, if you would like to contribute to QlikView Components, whether it be suggestions for new features, or becoming a co-developer, please get in touch with either Rob or myself.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome. Can't wait to see what's in it. You're right that the benefits far outweigh the hassle.

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    1. Hi Nate
      We're still working out the details of what's going to be migrated and I won't ruin the surprise. But so far we've added a few functions to replicate ones in Excel and SQL which QlikView doesn't have out of the box. And one other clue.... "Bundle" ;)
      Regards
      Matt

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