Author: Oscar Ortiz, Senior Consultant at Natural Synergies, Inc. and QlikView professional since 2003.

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to run a batch file after running a task in publisher?  Most of the time you would create a supporting task running an external program to take care of your situation using a batch file.

Example 1: Copy a File To Another Location

For example, maybe after creating a QVD in production you need to copy that QVD to your development server so developers have recent data to work with.  Normally, I would have created a batch file to take care of this for me.  That is until I realized that you could do this within a QlikView document using the Execute statement.

So instead of using a batch file to run through command strings you could do the same thing in a QlikView document.

You can accomplish this by using the Execute statement as follows:

So let’s break down what we are doing with the Execute statement.

First of all we are calling the command interpreter using the cmd.exe executable.  To use the command I’m using the /C switch which allows you to carry out the command specified by your string, then terminates.

Next, I pass the command I want the interpreter to carry out for me.  In this case I’m using the XCOPY command.  Setting the source as the QVD that I want to copy from and the destination as my development server.  I also pass the /Y switch because it will suppress prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file.

Example 2: Cleaning Up Log Files

Another example might be cleaning up log files.  In the following example I want to copy my log files to an archive folder and clean up my logs so I don’t have to search through days of logs in order to find the most recent log file.  You can accomplish this with a batch file that is running a string of commands like this:

You can accomplish the same thing by using the Execute statement as follows:

Again, let’s break down what we are doing with the Execute statement.

First of all, we are calling the command interpreter using the cmd.exe executable.  To use the command I’m using the /C switch which allows you to carry out the command specified by your string then terminates.

Next, I pass the command I want the interpreter to carry out for me.  In this case I’m using the XCOPY command.  Setting the source as the location of where my log files are that I want to copy from and the destination as my archive location.  I also pass the /Y switch because it will suppress prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file.

Note:

If you receive a security alert you may need to change your user preferences.  Under the security tab check the box for Script (Allow Database Write and Execute Statements)