How to use Subversion with QlikView tutorial

Coming from basic programming where you write every line of code yourself and collaborate with a lot of people in the same project. It becomes completely mindboggling that no one uses version control software with QlikView.

Many applications are super simple, so one might argue this is overkill. But QlikView is moving into the enterprise, and changes are made often, so proper version control and collaboration quickly because a most. At least to avoid the most common mistakes like overwriting others code.

No version control software is any good at handling binary files. And we been asking QlikTech to separate code and data for a long time, but since this is not the case we need to version control it somehow. I won't go into details about how to structure your script so that you can version control it better.

But I'm am going to let you in a little secret trick that I have discovered. The binary QlikView files can often be in the gigabytes. And commiting them is kind of a killer not only for your network but also for your subversion server. So what I do is empty them before I commit them.

SVN or CVS allows you to run a hook, before doing a commit (pre-commit). So what I have done is write a script that uses QlikView to empty the .qvw files and save them into another directory, which then is committed. Its a 2 part script. The first script loops a directory. This is easily done in regular command line. And parses the files with .qvw to another script called qv-nodata.vbs.

set QV=C:\Program Files\QlikView\qv.exe

set Home_path=D:\svn
set Master_home=%Home_path%\QlikView\Master
set Repos_home=%Home_path%\QlikView\MasterRepos
set Hook=%Home_path%\QlikView\Scripts\qv-nodata.vbs

for /F "tokens=*" %%a IN ('dir /b %Master_home%\*.qvw') 
do ( call cscript "%Hook%" "%Master_home%\%%~a" "%Repos_home%\%%~a" )

REM pause

The other script uses the OCX object to create a new QlikView instance, for this I need Visual Basic, without data and then save it to another location:

docpath = WScript.Arguments.Unnamed(0)
savepath = WScript.Arguments.Unnamed(1)

set qv = CreateObject("QlikTech.QlikView")
set objDoc = qv.openDocEx(docpath,0,false,"","","",true)
objDoc.SaveAs savepath
objDoc.GetApplication.Quit

Add this as a "pre-commit hook" in your svn settings.

D:\svn\QlikView\Scripts\qv-hook.bat

and when you select commit a few QlikView windows will pop up and when you are done, you simply select the empty files you want to commit. And no this will not work on linux ;) Its dead easy!