Instant QlikView App Development How-to Analyzing movies example (Simple) QlikView 11 is designed to use a methodology of Social Business Discovery to enable users to collaborate on their discoveries. But before we can collaborate and jointly interpret our findings, we need to have some experience and ideas of the types of analysis we can perform. This recipe will give a simple introduction to the uses of QlikView. Powerful business insight comes not just from data or from what one person sees and thinks. It comes from the combination of varied viewpoints, conclusions, and compromises of people both formally and informally. Social Business Discovery builds on what QlikView calls their direct discovery feature. The direct discovery feature is a built-in capability where in-memory and direct discovery datasets can be analyzed together, even on the same chart. The users can make selections on either of the datasets, the in-memory dataset or the direct discovery dataset, and see what is associated and not associated with the standard QlikView association colors; green, gray, and white (or customize the interface to use colors of their own choice). Then the user can create charts that will help them analyze data from both datasets together. The following quote is taken from the QLIKVIEW 11.2 DIRECT DISCOVERY FAQ PDF file: QlikView Direct Discovery enables users to perform business discovery and visual analysis against any amount of data, regardless of size. With the introduction of this unique hybrid approach, users can associate data stored within big data sources directly alongside additional data sources stored within the QlikView in-memory model. QlikView can seamlessly connect to multiple data sources together within the same interface, e.g. Teradata to SAP to Facebook allowing the business user to associate data across the data silos. Specifically, in list boxes, selected items are highlighted in green, possible items are highlighted in white, and excluded items turn gray with white lettering. 1 Instant QlikView App Development How-to Getting ready You may have played the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or at least heard of it. It is a game based on the sociological theory of six degrees of separation, the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram put the idea of six degrees of separation to the test in the 1960s by asking volunteers to get a message to a random individual living near Boston. The test subjects were asked to send the message to a friend who was more likely than they to know the target person. It took an average of 5.2 people in the chain to get the letter to the target, so because it was over five, the theory rounded up to six degrees apart from any other person on the globe. Duncan Watts expanded the theory of six degrees of separation to Network Theory, the scientific field that examines how networks form and how they work in society. Network Theory covers many subjects, including: • How people interact socially • How diseases spread • How people find jobs • How aspects of the World Wide Web operate Using this theory and the QlikView Movie Database available from QlikView in the Getting Started examples section; we are going to play the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as an analysis example. If we understand how to analyze data on this smaller scale, then it should make it easier for us to see ways of using the expanded and refined version, Network Theory, to analyze our own data in ways we might not have seen before. How to do it... We start by opening QlikView 11. This time at the start screen, scroll down to the Examples section and select Movie Database. Note that it claims to have over four thousand movies. With approximately four hundred movies produced each year, currently, that represents the equivalent of ten years of recent movies, but the movies in the QlikView Movie Database range from Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) to movies released in the year 2008. Therefore, we know it is not a comprehensive list of movie titles, directors, and actors. If you are interested in verifying this for yourself, jump to the Analysis tab of the QlikView Movie Database. 2 Instant QlikView App Development How-to For this game, we are going to use the QlikView Model sheet, the fourth tab from the left. Here we can start with the actors. It so happens that when I was a child, the actor Joseph Cotten came over to my aunt's house. I was allowed to sit on the floor and listen to his stories about Hollywood. So this means that I am one degree of separation from the actor Joseph Cotten. But how far does that put me from Kevin Bacon? Since we know from our preceding analysis that this is not a comprehensive database, first we need to make sure the actors we are interested in are actually in the database. Working from Kevin Bacon, we use the built in search functionality to select Kevin Bacon. The Search icon looks like a little magnifying glass. 3 Instant QlikView App Development How-to In the next screenshot, we can see in white in the center list box, the movies that Kevin Bacon has worked in which are present in the QlikView Movie Database. The list shows: • Animal House • National Lampoon's Animal House • Delta Gänget (1978) The preceding names are of the same movie, the last being the Swedish title. In the following list, note how the "The" in front of The Woodsman is moved to the back to make alphabetical sorting correct. • Apollo 13 1995 • Hollow Man 2000 • JFK 1991 • Mystic River 2003 • The Woodsman 2004. From this we can verify that the Movies Database is incomplete. If we check the Internet Movie Database (www.IMDb.com) for example we can see that this database is missing several movies that Kevin Bacon appeared in, such as Footloose (1984), Tremors (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), and Stir of Echoes (1999). IMDb.com shows that to the date of this writing, Kevin Bacon has appeared as an actor in 75 movies, so if we were depending upon the QlikView Movie Database for an important analysis, we would need to make sure we updated the data from several sources to get complete information for our analysis. But for purposes of this analysis, we are just trying to connect the author to Kevin Bacon in six or less links. Now we will search on Joseph Cotten (1905-1994) in the Actors list box to make sure he is in the database. 4 Instant QlikView App Development How-to We can see that the QlikView Movie Database has 19 movies listed that Joseph Cotten has worked in, among them Citizen Kane (1941), The Third Man (1949), Soylent Green (1973), and Airport 77 (1977). This does not include many of the 132 titles shown in IMDb.com. Most importantly, he is in the QlikView Movie Database for our analysis. Now, we will select all of the directors that have worked with Joseph Cotten by right- clicking on the Directors list box and choosing Select Possible. If we edit the list box by right-clicking and choosing Properties instead, we could chose to put the Select Possible icon on the List Box toolbar. The checkbox to add this icon is in the Caption tab under the Special Icons section as shown in the following screenshot: The Select Possible icon looks like a spreadsheet with a single checkmark. See the following screenshot for reference: 5 Instant QlikView App Development How-to Also, while we are in the Caption tab, we notice how the title with the count of the number of directors is added to the List Box toolbar: =Minstring({<Index = {5}>} [$(vLanguage)]) & ': ' & Count (DISTINCT Director) The following function will give us the same results, but is not as dynamic and will not automatically convert the title to another language. On the other hand, this is easier to read and understand without needing to understand Visual Basic coding. ='Director ' & ': ' & Count (DISTINCT Director) The preceding screenshot shows how we select all possible directors who have worked with Joseph Cotten: After selecting all the directors who have worked with Joseph Cotten, we clear the Actor selection by clicking on the icon—that looks like an eraser—to show all the names of the actors that have worked with the directors who have worked with Joseph Cotten. The names of these actors are now shown in white. We also see that the 11 directors selected now have 193 movie titles listed in the center section in white and the possible actors total shows 2474. We scroll down the list of actors and see that Kevin Bacon does not appear in the white highlighted list. We are going to need to find an overlapping connecting actor. An actor that has worked for two different directors, one who has worked with Joseph Cotten and one who has worked with Kevin Bacon. 6 Instant QlikView App Development How-to Now George Cukor has directed 52 films in the database and Alfred Hitchcock directed 68 so chances are excellent that there is overlap, but that also gives us a lot of films and actors to search through to find our link. Let us start withJerry Jameson, the first director with only two movies on the list instead. This should narrow down our search. And if we don't find a connection there, we can always broaden our search.