A Simple HTML Weather Widget in Qlik Sense

Widgets were introduced in Qlik Sense 3.0 and provide a way to use HTML and CSS to create simple, interactive objects in a Qlik Sense app, without the need for complex coding. Unlike extensions, widgets don't require JavaScript. Widgets can be used for navigation, simple charts, KPIs and can use dimension and measure values from the app they are used in. Widgets can also display web based content easily. I wanted to display the weather in Moscow in our World Cup prediction competition Sense app at the 2018 Qlik Summit, which was easy to do using a widget.

Because all of the code is generated by the Metoblue widget generator, you don't need CSS to style this widget, you can simply paste in the copied HTML. This widget is not dependent on any data from the app, so that's all you need to do. Once saved, the widget will be available from the Custom Objects panel for use in any app.

That's just a quick example of how you can use good copy-and-paste skills to display useful web based content in a Qlik Sense app, without any coding. You can probably think of other examples; a stock ticker with share prices, contact details from a website, product images from an online catalog. The next step for this example would be to make it interactive, to add a Dimension and allow the user to select a city to view the weather forecast for that city. The widget uses the city codes from geonames.org, so cities in the data would need to be mapped to their Geo Name code. My next project... :-)