Using Alerts in QlikView

Alerts are quite easy to set up. With a few tricks, they can become quite powerful.

Let me start with a very simple data set:

CountrySales:
LOAD * INLINE [
Country, Sales
England, 400
Ireland, 300
Scotland, 200
Wales, 100
];

Now, I want to create an Alert when there are any countries that have Sales > 200.

To create an alert, I need to be able to create an expression that will return a true value. I could use a simple aggr expression like:

=Sum(Aggr(If(Sum(Sales)>1, 1), Country)) > 0

This will work. However, it means that we are going to be limited to what information we can include in the Alert message. We can include the number of Countries, but we couldn't, for example, say which ones they were.

A more powerful way is to combine Advanced Search, Bookmarks and Alerts.

If I create an Advanced Search against the Country field such as:

=Sum(Sales)>200

Then I save this search as a Bookmark. Now, I can create an Alert with this Bookmark used where the Alert is simply:

=Count(Distinct Country) > 0

And the Alert message could be something like:

='Number of countries exceeding 200 = ' & Count(Distinct Country) & chr(13) &
'Countries: ' & Concat(Country, ', ')

Of course, I can bring any other information into this message that is related to the countries that match the Bookmark.

Now, if I set-up the "Mail" options under User Preferences, I can have this document email an alert to someone.

If I turn on the alert to use "Batch Mode", this can happen on the server when the document is reloaded.