Often, the data required for the purpose of reporting is not stored in a database, but instead needs to be fetched from a website. For example, customer location information specifically the geographic co-ordinates used in mapping analysis is not available internally within an organization. This information may be available on the web and can be extracted from there.
When extracting the data from a web file:
http://www.csgnetwork.com/llinfotable.html
QlikSense Cookbook Webfile
, as shown:Country_Location
and the script will read as follows:Country_Location: LOAD Country, Capital, Latitude, Longitude FROM [lib://QlikSense Cookbook Webfile] (html, codepage is 1252, embedded labels, table is @2);
Qlik Sense connects to the web file using the stored data connection. Once connected it identifies the tables in the HTML source and lists them in the preview window.
Certain external websites require authentication in order to be accessed and Qlik Sense is unable to cope with websites that are secured in this manner. In order to get over this issue, we can use a third party data extraction tool. The extracted data can be stored in a data file, such as a qvd. The qvd file can then be used as a data source in the Qlik Sense application.
Qlik Sense can also extract data from other data formats, such as XML. The underlying principles remain the same as explained in the preceding recipes.