Qlik Sense Mashup

For the second blog of the year, I wanted to cover something less technical. So I picked Qlik Sense Mashup as the topic. Time and time again, we are seeing the increase in demand to create mashups (or web applications) to serve number of requirements – be a custom look and feel to the the analytics applications for the business users to advanced web applications with other business contexts. The term mashup is not always the correct term, as they are not always a true mashup, instead they are just dashboard built as a Single Page Application (SPA) from the same Qlik Sense application to customise the look and feel and sometimes, to simplify things for business user who may not have the need for the full Qlik Sense hub experience. This is also the way to serve static or guided analytics.

Out into the wild – life outside of Qlik Sense hub

There are many ways we can serve Qlik Sense contents without the usual hub experience. I wanted to explore some of the very simple concepts where very little technical skills are required.

Embedded Sheets

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Sometimes you may want to share a particular sheet you have built and want your user to go straight into that particular sheet without the added hub experience (ex – streams, opening app and opening sheets etc). The simplest way to achieve this is to use the embed sheet functionality. To do this, simply navigate to the sheet that you wish to share, click on the navigation menu button at the top left of the screen and select “Embed sheet”. This will give you number of options that you can turn on/off when sharing the page. For example, you can turn the selection option off if you do not wish your user/s to make any selections. You can also choose to apply a particular bookmark they will see when they visit the sheet.

At the bottom of the popup screen, you will see the iframe code that gets generated based on the options that you have selected. You can just copy the URL in the src=”your embedded sheet url” and share that with anyone who has access to the Qlik Sense environment. Now they will be able to go to the sheet and consume the dashboard without the hub experience.

There are couple of downsides to this approach. For example, embedding sheets does not particularly work well with mobile/small screen devices, so be mindful of that. Also, the URL generated by Qlik Sense is not particularly user friendly.

Embedded Charts

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To embed the chart, you follow the similar steps as embedding sheets, just right click on the desired chart and and click on “</>Embed chart” option.

That brings me to the second option, using the Qlik Sense content library to serve some very basic HTML page/s with embedded charts/sheets from your Qlik Sense application/s. This method has been first shared (here) by non other than Steve Dark while back. This requires a bit of HTML and (maybe) some CSS knowledge, but essentially you can just use any pre-built single web page template and and embed your Qlik Sense sheet/s or chart/s and upload the final HTML file to your Qlik Sense content library (via QMC) and share the link. This gives a bit more user friendly link for your mashup and also gives bit more control over the content layout and customisation options, without having to venture into the world of JavaScript.

There are couple of benefits to this approach. Firstly, you can use a shorter, more user-friendly URL, including using the name of the HTML file and the content library to make this more relatable to the the content being delivered. Secondly, this approach also means that you can control who can view this web page using the security rules associated with the content library, which is an added benefit on top of the other security rules already applied to the app/steam.

Next…

Next time I will try to explore some more ways to share Qlik Sense analytics, some more common technologies and methods that are being used to build and deploy Qlik Sense mashups.

Meanwhile, I hope this will help some people to take a bold step into (and some ways outside of hub) the world of Qlik Sense mashup. I would like to hear about what other ways people are sharing their Qlik analytics, so please feel free to share if you have different ideas, here or at my social media channels – Twitter or LinkedIn.