QlikTip #28: Configuring “Associative Search” in QlikView 10

In QlikTip#26 I announced to write some details on how to configure “Associative Search” in QlikView 10.

First of all I’d like to bring the following article on “Associative Search” to your attention which has been posted in the new QlikView 10 WIKI section on community.qlikview.com.

An excerpt of the most important part of this article:

1. Search mode for any list box can be tailored to one of the following:
   1. Wildcard Search (was default behavior in previous versions)
   2. Normal
   3. Fuzzy (as version 9)
   4. Associative – ability to search this list box based on values in associated data elements
2. The standard search mode has dropped the default ‘*’ (wildcard) to frame the search string. This means a user can now simply type the words or phrases of interest. Words separated by a space are searched using a logical OR, meaning they can appear in any order in the target value. Phrases can be searched by framing the phrase in “”, forcing QlikView to find an exact string match. This brings QlikView in line with most commonly accepted search engine functionality.
3. Associative Search can be further configured so that you can limit Search to:
   1. All fields associated with the target
   2. A list of fields (built by an expression)
   3. Manually selected list of fields

So let’s now concentrate on configuring the “Associative Search”:

How to configure “Associative Search” in detail:

First go to the properties of one of your list boxes:

List Box properties to change the "Default Search Mode" to "Use Associative Search"

After doing so “Associative Search” is active for this list box.

Per default the associative search would search within all fields of your document. But you can change this behavior by going to More Search Settings:

Opening the search settings for the associative search

More Search Settings for Associative Search

Besides enabling associative search in all fields in your document there are the following options available:

Enabling associative search for a “List of fields”

You can define a list of fields built with an expression. The fields should be separated with commas (Note: this is so far not documented in the reference manual, but it works … :-)).
Example:

// The following expression would define Field1 & Field2 & Field3 if there is only one value for "Year" available, otherwiese just Field1
=if(getPossibleCount(Year) = 1, 'Field1,Field2,Field3', 'Field1')

Sorry: While writing this article I could not find a really sensefull business case for defining the fields using an expression; but I’m sure you’ll find one

Enabling associative search for “Selected Fields”:

You will be shown the following dialog where you can define the desired fields:

Selecting some fields to be included in the associative search.