AND Mode in Set Analysis

Was on QlikCommunity recently and answered a query by Lawrence Chapman - Like for Like

When Lawrence replied, he said that he was looking for something quite reasonable in his chart - only sites that had records for all the 4 years.

I was thinking that this should be quite straightforward and then had to have another think!  The thing about QlikView set analysis is that it is just a set of selections.  The default selection mode in a field in QlikView is "OR".  So, if I select all the 4 years, I will still select all the sites because all of them are in at least one year.  Creating a set based in the year field wouldn't work for what Lawrence wanted.

I thought about how I would select those sites if I was just doing it in the layout (which is a great strategy for designing a set).  The only way that I can think of doing it is to have a selection box using QlikView's AND-mode.

Now, for AND-mode to be enabled, there are a certain number of criteria that need to be fulfilled.  Basically, the field needs to be in a table of only 2 fields and it is the 2nd field (the first is the key field associating the rest of the data set).  Also, the table needs to be loaded with the DISTINCT keyword to remove duplicates (have a look in the help file for more info).

Let me create a quick example to show this in action.  Here is a sales table:


Sales:
LOAD * INLINE [
    Customer, Year, Sales
    Customer A, 2009, 111
    Customer B, 2009, 111
    Customer C, 2009, 111
    Customer A, 2010, 222
    Customer B, 2010, 222
    Customer C, 2010, 222
    Customer A, 2011, 333
    Customer C, 2011, 333
];


You will note that only Customer A and Customer C exist in all years.  However, if I load this data, there is no set that I can create that shows me just the totals for those 2 customers based only on the fact that they have sales in each of the years.

So, I will create an AND-mode field:


SalesYear:
Load Distinct 
Customer,
Year As SalesYear
Resident Sales;


Once loaded, I add this field to the layout and select the "AND-mode" option in the List Box properties (this option will be grayed out unless the field fulfills the criteria above).

N.B.  At this stage, just after setting "AND-mode" in the list box, you may need to just run a re-load to set the internal flag that makes everything else below work.

Now, I can create a set expression like this:

Sum({<SalesYear={2009,2010,2011}>} Sales)

And it will only show me the sales for Customer A and C.

I could make this more generic by limiting the SalesYear to the currently selected Years:

Sum({<SalesYear=P({$} Year)>} Sales)

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Stephen Redmond is CTO of CapricornVentis a QlikView Elite Partner