Among the tasks related to preparing a QlikView document for a production environment, there is one that tends to be underestimated: fixing the position and size of sheet objects. If the user interface is large enough (lots of sheets packed with objects, some of them hidden), manually changing the object properties one at a time can be a daunting task!

More often than not, it is irrelevant or misleading to allow the end user to move/resize objects such as list boxes, multiboxes, inputboxes, current selections and text objects. There is an option to automate fixing the objects: in QlikView Server Management Console / General we find a checkbox “Disallow moving and sizing objects” which is a switch that turns off this setting for all documents.

But then there is the case of charts and tables: for these, the situation might be different because sometimes it is desirable to allow users to maximize, move or enlarge these objects to avoid scrolling or just to have a better visualization due to differences in screen resolution.

While trying to find a way to sort this out I was encouraged to use themes to acomplish tasks like these. Although themes are usually used for other purposes I decided to play a little bit with the feature to see what I could find. It turned out to be a great way of automatically setting almost any property across a QlikView document. The wizard is intuitive and very powerful, but we need to understand how it works to be able to control which specific properties are changed when applying the theme.

Themes are files (extension qvt) that contain information about document/sheet/object properties. They are usually used to replicate a predefined look and feel on new QlikView documents but we can also benefit from them in other ways.

Themes are handled from the Layout tab, which is included in the document properties, sheet properties and object properties dialogs. There are two buttons: “Theme Maker” and “Apply Theme”. The first is a wizard to create your own themes or modify an existing one and the second is a wizard to apply an already existing theme. Machines with an installed QlikView developer have a default folder for themes (C:\Program Files\QlikView\Themes) which are ready to be used.

The Theme Maker wizard works based on the objects within the active document. The first step is to specify whether we want to create a new theme or change an existing one. In the second step we select the source to extract properties from, this could be the document itself, a sheet or a sheet object. If we select an object as the source, we can also specify the property groups that we want to work with in the theme: object type specific, caption & border and print settings. I suggest selecting them all to fully understand what will and what will not be included.

The third step consists of three windows (one for each property group) containing a list of available properties to include in the theme. Every checkbox we tick will include the property value of the source object in the theme. Unchecked boxes will mean the theme is “neutral” on that property, in other words, when we apply the theme to other objects those properties values will not be changed. One thing to consider: when we include a property into a theme its value can be modified later (i.e. by overriding with another source object) but we cannot make the theme “neutral” on that property anymore.

This is already saving me lots of time, I hope you find it useful too. It would be great to hear about similar experiences, so any comments or suggestions on other good uses of themes is welcomed.