Qlik NPrinting November 2019 Release – An Ometis Guide

Qlik NPrinting November 2019 release is out and to follow-up on his Qlik Sense November 2019 blog, Chris Lofthouse has taken a close look at the new features and functionality. 

Qlik NPrinting November 2019 Release

We now have the November 2019 release of Qlik NPrinting and what better way to round out the year than with a feature gap filled and a migration tool to quickly migrate from the old to the new Qlik NPrinting?

QlikView NPrinting 16 migration tool

The migration tool makes it easy to migrate from QlikView NPrinting 16.3+ to Qlik NPrinting November 2019 and future releases. In a few simple steps, you can import connections, filters, reports and more. I strongly recommend reading the Planning your migration page on the Qlik help site, which is very comprehensive, along with an instructive YouTube video.

While it’s really great to see the new migration tool released, it is worth noting that there are still some older features that are yet to be provided in the latest version.

In a nutshell, here are a list of unsupported features, between the two versions:

• FTP destinations.
• Pretty good privacy (PGP) encryption.
• Send to printer.
• Test, Reload, Partial Reload, Reduce, and Macro tasks.
• Attach external files to email.
• Unsupported output formats (.docm, .pptm).
• Compressed generated reports.
• Importing external HTML files into email bodies.
• Linked fields.
• Macros in Word or PowerPoint templates.

These features are partially migrated:

• Bookmark filters.
• Email tags (see Qlik help site to see the tags which are not supported).

In addition to the above, I’ve condensed the main ‘Gotchas’:

• Backup your NPrinting files before doing anything!
• Use a copy of your Qlik NPrinting files you that you intend to migrate, as you may be required to delete legacy/broken resources.
• Local connection should use a UNC path i.e. \\ServerName\FolderName\QliKViewDocument.qvw.
• Qlik NPrinting November 2019 only supports section access with NT security.
• QlikView NPrinting 16 field-based filters work differently in Qlik NPrinting November 2019. For example, in NP November 2019 the default behaviour for filters is to verify the filter, where as this was optional in NP16. Therefore, make sure you test them!
• Recipient import tasks are not migrated, and the excel template differs. Sample files can be found here.
• Schedules are not migrated into triggers. You need to manually recreate them in the migrated publish tasks.
• In QlikView NPrinting 16, each recipient has a unique ID and you could create multiple recipients with the same email address and different filters. This is not possible in NP November 2019, but there is a workaround.
• If you wish to chain jobs, like you could in NPrinting 16 you will also have to use the APIs for this workaround.
• In NPrinting 16, conditions are associated to a report, whereas in Qlik NPrinting November 2019 they are associated to reports in tasks. These will still be migrated but it’s a different location to find them.

Variable-based filters

Qlik NPrinting now supports variable-based filters, filling a feature gap with NPrinting 16. This enables report developers to use it in a filter and set the value of the variable directly during report generation. This has quite a limited number of use-cases I can think of, the main use-case that springs to mind is if you are using a variable to control the behaviour of a visualisation in some form e.g. controlling the dimension displayed, mimicking a cyclic group, or if you have radio buttons controlling currency. Regardless, it is nice to see Qlik close the gap functionality on its predecessor.

Qlik have really ramped up the plugging of feature gaps between NPrinting 16 and the newer releases (commonly referred to as version 17) in 2019. With the addition of the migration tool in the Qlik NPrinting November 2019 release, it’s clear they want all customers to transition over to the newer release in time for the end of life deadline, for NPrinting 16, on March 31st 2020. We now have the majority of our customers migrated, with the last couple waiting for the anticipated migration tool before taking the leap.

As always, we’re keen to hear your thoughts on Qlik NPrinting November 2019. Please share, like and comment on the post or through LinkedIn, Twitter and/or YouTube.

By Chris Lofthouse
Follow @clofthouse89