Welcome to another #Feature Friday!
Today we are covering a little known feature:
Expression Editor
In Mail & Deploy, expressions can be used to supply values to certain functions. They are a combination of well known Qlik Code, easy-to-understand Mail & Deploy Code and Visual Basic.NET.
Do not worry, Mail & Deploy already has a large list of built-in values for you to choose from in the expression editor. So you certainly do not need to have a deeper knowledge of Visual Basic.NET.
However, expressions allow you to fully customize your reports and specify the tasks for the report distribution in Mail & Deploy. With expressions, you can make your Qlik reporting even more dynamic and powerful.
Of course, you are free to type expressions yourself. Mail & Deploy, however, is all about saving time in your reporting. Therefore you can simply pick one of the ready-to-use values in the expression editor of Mail & Deploy.
You can choose between Constant Values, Dynamic values or Calculations (values calculated from constant and/or dynamic values).
To give you an idea of how this feature of Mail & Deploy can simplify your reporting with QlikView and Qlik Sense, we want to highlight two commonly used expressions.
Datasource Bookmark Name
If you choose this option, a new dialog will appear that allows you to pick one of your bookmarks of one of the data sources. A constant value will be inserted into the expression that equals the name of the selected bookmark.
Report Document Existence
Sometimes it is necessary to check whether a report document with a certain name actually exists.
Let us suppose you have a task that creates a report document based on a report, embeds it in a group, saves the report document to the file system and distributes it by e-mail.
This report has a condition, that the report document is only created if that condition is fulfilled.
Obviously, the actions in the group, which save the report document to the file system and distribute the report document by e-mail should only be executed if the report document has actually been created (e.g. if the condition of the report was fulfilled).
This can easily be achieved by setting a condition on the group action that tests for the existence of the report document; the condition for the expression needs to check whether the report document exists. If the report document does not exist, the group condition will not be fulfilled and therefore the actions to save and distribute the report document will not be executed.
If you want to know more about the expression editor and how you can use Visual Basic.Net in Mail & Deploy or get the full list of expressions, just give us a shout. We are happy to show you what is possible with our Qlik Reporting Suite.