The third text object in the first row of objects is a little more interesting. It looks like a button and, indeed, if clicked on, it has an action—to clear all the selections. Look at the Properties of the text object that looks like a button that says Clear All. On the very first tab, the General tab, we can see that it is indeed a picture instead of text such as the title. This particular picture even has the words Clear All right in it. We just learned that text objects can actually contain pictures. An actual Button object could have been used instead of the text object with Actions. Either object functions the same way based on the Actions associated with it.

Figure 3-3: The Button object created to clear selections

Several kinds of picture formats can be used: bitmaps (.bmp), jpegs (.jpg or .jpeg), graphic interchange formats (.gif), and portable network graphics (.png) will be the types listed if you click on the radio button for Image and then the Change… button to choose an image.

On the Actions tab, there is a box that shows what Action is selected, if any. This particular instance of text object has the Clear All action selected. If you click on the Add button below the box, then the types of actions are displayed on the left-hand side. And when you select one of the action types, the different actions associated with that Action type are displayed on the right-hand side to be selected.

Figure 3-4: Selection type action choices

There are five action types for text objects:

In the second row of sheet objects, we find alternating text objects to describe the list boxes. So, the words Filter by Year are in a text object, and the actual years that can be selected are in a List Box displayed as 2009|2010|2011 and available for selection. Next comes another text object that identifies that the next List Box contains Month for selection. What we have failed to notice is that there is actually a sheet object between the first row of text and the second row of text. If you right-click the pale-blue line in between and choose Properties, you will see that it is a Line/Arrow object [] with three linked objects. Using Properties in the General tab, experiment with making Line/Arrow objects appear in different colors.

Figure 3-8: Line/Arrow Properties | General tab | Color Area

What looks like a third row of sheet objects is actually an interconnected set of text objects with Actions and layered charts, along with a block of layered, invisible charts made visible by Set Variable Action. So, when we click on a row with the stoplight circle, we are actually selecting a text object and that, in turn, makes the associated blue bar chart visible. The first stoplight row, Revenue vs Budget , is text object TX103 and passes the vShowChart variable set to a value of 1. This makes chart object CH54 visible because, in the Layout tab of the Properties chart, the Show section picks up the vShowChart variable when the value is 1. The next stoplight row in the table-like structure uses the same variable vShowChart (as does each of the other rows), but the variable is set to equal 2 (or 3, 4, and so on) to control its associated chart.

The Layout tab of Properties also contains the Layer designation. There are three standard Layer designations—Top, Normal, and Bottom—corresponding to the internally numbered layers 1, 0, and -1, respectively. Custom layer values between -128 and 127 are accepted. Choose Custom to enter a value of your choice.

Figure 3-9: Chart CH54 Layout tab with Show Conditional Variable

An additional chart object is layered under the rows of Text objects. For each row of the table-like structure, they use images to display the appropriate red or green circle images as an Image Chart object. Next in Chart object, Text Chart object is used to display the percentage. Finally, to get the bar line, Linear Gauge is used. These are all a single chart object with multiple displays. For example, for the last text object row in the KPIs measures block—Inventory-Turns per Year—the three charts in the chart object are set up in the following manner:

On the Dimension Limits tab, the dimension used is this formula:

=If([Dashboard Metric]='AR: Day Sales O/S' or [Dashboard Metric]='Inventory - Turns p77781er Year',[Dashboard Metric]) 

Then, on the Expressions tab, we have three representations of the same information. The first is Image, the second Text, and the third Linear Gauge:

Figure 3-10: The Expressions tab with three chart types selected

Only the stoplight image chart has a definition entered on the Expressions tab. In the previous image, we can see the tail end of the expression definition with eight parentheses. The definition is an expression that tells the chart to flip between the red and green images. This is the definition code used for the Inventory – Turns per Year:

If([Dashboard Metric]='Inventory - Turns per Year',
   If((Sum(ThroughputQty*CostPrice)/Sum(StockOH*CostPrice))>10,'qmem://<bundled>/BuiltIn/led_g.png',
   If((Sum(ThroughputQty*CostPrice)/Sum(StockOH*CostPrice))<=10 and (Sum(ThroughputQty*CostPrice)/Sum(StockOH*CostPrice))>5,'qmem://<bundled>/BuiltIn/led_g.png',
   If((Sum(ThroughputQty*CostPrice)/Sum(StockOH*CostPrice))<=5,'qmem://<bundled>/BuiltIn/led_g.png')))
))))))))

The parts of the code line in single quotes with the extension .png are the image files and their paths. We will create our own image display in Chapter 9, QlikView Expenses Dashboard.