Recently I’ve been having great fun with input fields.

For those of you not aware (which was me only a month or two ago) Input fields behave somewhat differently from regular fields. The most important difference is their ability to accept changes in field values without running the script.

On the face of it great! Users can enter their own data. Although in practice doing so can be a bit clunky. In charts you can use the expression inputsum() but this only works for numeric values. If you use only() for example text will be displayed but you can’t edit it (nor can you if the InputField is a dimension on the chart.

I have been playing around with them using macros (which opens up a whole world of possibilities).

Ok, so I know that Macro’s are frowned upon (Macros in QlikView – Good or Bad Practice?) but they’re there and can be utilized in the right way for certain tasks. Test first, and test with large data sets to see what impact they may have and always use as a last resort….

Here is a quick example of using a macro to update a InputField,  In this example a user can select a single row and then use an action button (which drives a macro) to write either ‘True’ or ‘False’ to the input field.

InputField_VB