As we've seen in the previous chapter, HighCloud Airlines has a particular need: to be able to analyze the US airline market from different perspectives, be able to create reports that help them better understand what the situation is, and evaluate if entering that market is a good strategy. Sara took the risk and showed the CEO what they could potentially do with QlikView and he was impressed by what he saw. After their meeting, Sara was asked to arrange a formal proof-of-concept session.
This chapter will not only follow a QlikView team working on the Seeing is Believing (SiB) phase of the pre-sale process, along with the HighCloud Airlines executives evaluating it, but it will also help us learn some basic concepts about developing QlikView documents.
So, let's get our hands on the subject and start creating. There is no better way to learn than by doing, and this chapter will be the initial platform on which we will base our QlikView development experience. It will help you build your first business discovery app with QlikView, completely hands-on from the start.
On a technical level, after going through the tutorial presented in this chapter, you will be able to:
- Understand the steps required in the construction process of a QlikView document
- Identify what dimensions and expressions are within the context of a QlikView document
- Build charts to visualize and aggregate data
- Design a basic user interface for navigating through the QlikView document
A SiB (an acronym for Seeing is Believing) is the proof-of-concept session in which, during the pre-sale process, the technical capabilities of the QlikView software are demonstrated to the prospective customer. The way we demo QlikView at this stage usually involves creating a targeted QlikView document that uses the customer's actual data in a limited amount of time.
That's why, in this chapter, we will build a QlikView document based on real and useful data, focused on HighCloud Airlines' line of business. The dataset we will use is publicly available and covers information about airline operations in the US. The original data files have been downloaded from The Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the United States website (http://transtats.bts.gov), and have been pre-processed so that we can focus on the main concepts this chapter is intended to outline. As the book evolves, we will introduce more advanced concepts so that, in the end, we are able to work with the original data files throughout the whole processing phase.
Because of the nature of the SiB phase, the analytical application should be developed rather quickly by the QlikView team. Since it will mainly be focused on technical features and data discovery functionalities, some design details (such as color, style, object positioning, and so on) have been left out for now. However, these details will be covered in their own good time, later in the book.