Google Drive

The Qlik Google Drive Web Storage Provider connector lets you fetch your stored data from Google Drive repositories, allowing you to load data directly into your Qlik Sense app.

When you authenticate the Google Drive Web Storage Provider Connector, you use an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user to provide access. This IAM user has the access configured in your Google Drive account. Refer to the Amazon documentation (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/using-iam-policies.html) for guidance on determining an appropriate policy, including the ability to scope to specific files/permissions such as control over read/write. Any user granted Can Edit / Can Consume Data (Shared Spaces) or Can Consume Data / Can Manage (Managed Spaces) roles to the Google Drive data connection's space can view files in the configured S3 bucket as defined by the IAM user's policy.

Connecting to a Google Drive account

To access your Google Drive data, you will need to authenticate the connector with your Google Drive account credentials.

You can access the connector through Add data and the Data load editor.

From Add data, select Google Drive from the list of data connectors.
From the Data load editor, click Create new connection and select Google Drive.

Creating a connection

Authentication

The first step to create a Google Drive connection is to authenticate the connector with your Google Drive credentials. You need to sign into your Google Drive account to generate an authentication code.

To do this, select Authenticate to open the Google Drive sign-in page. Sign in and then copy and paste the authentication code into the connector. Click Verify.

If the Google Drive log-in page does not open, disable your pop-up blocker in your browser.

After you click Verify, the account details are displayed in the connection dialog. If the authentication token has an expiry date, it will be shown here. You can select Update to change the Google Drive connection credentials or to generate a new expiration date.

When you are finished setting up your data connection, click Create to save the connection. The connection credentials are verified automatically. From the Data load editor, you can also verify the connection before you create it by clicking Test Connection.

Add data

A default name is applied to the data connection.

Data load editor

You can specify a connection name or leave the default name for the connection.

Connector location

The location of the connection depends on how you select data.

From Add data, it will be saved under File Locations.
From the Data load editor, it will be saved under Data connections with the name that you provided.

Selecting data with a Google Drive connection

When you create a Google Drive connection with Add data, the data selection step follows immediately. When you create a data connection with the Data load editor, you need to open the data connection before you can select data.

To select data, first, navigate to the file path location on your Google Drive account. Next, locate your files by clicking on the folder names. You can navigate backwards by clicking on the previous folder in the path field or by clicking Undo . You can filter the file types that are shown by using the File type drop-down menu.

Google Drive folder structure view

First, select a file. Then, select the data tables and the data fields that you want to load. You can rename data fields before loading them into Qlik Sense by clicking on the field name and entering a new name. The new name is mapped by Qlik Sense as an alias to that field name in the database.

Data field renaming by selecting field name above table data

Data file properties

If you are loading data from an excel file or from a delimited file, you may need to adjust the data file properties. The following table describes the data file properties for these file types:

Data file properties available to be configured
Parameter	Option	Description	For file type
Field names	Embedded field names	Set to specify if the table contains Embedded field names or No field names. Typically, in an Excel spreadsheet, the first row contains the embedded field names.	Delimited files .xls/.xlsx
Field names	No field names	Select if the fields are not labeled. If you select this option, fields will be named A,B,C...	Delimited files .xls/.xlsx
Header size	-	Set to the number of header rows to ignore. Typically, you want to exclude rows that contain general information that is not in a columnar format.	Delimited files .xls/.xlsx
Delimiter	-	Set the field delimiter. Select a standard delimiter (comma, semicolon, space, tab) or a custom delimiter.	Delimited files
Quoting	MSQ	Used to specify modern style quoting which allows multi-line content. End-of-line characters must be enclosed with double quotation marks. Double quotation marks (“) appearing as the first or last character in field content will be interpreted as the start or end of multi-line content.	Delimited files
Quoting	Standard	Used to specify standard quoting. Double and single quotation marks accepted only when they are the first and last blank character of a field value.	Delimited files
Quoting	No Quote	Used if quotation marks are not to be accepted in the file.	Delimited files
Character set	-	Select the character set for the data you are loading. Select a standard character set or a custom character set.	Delimited files
Ignore end-of-file-character	-	Select to ignore characters with code point 26, which otherwise denotes an end-of-file character, are disregarded and can be part of a field value. Only relevant for .txt files	Delimited files
Comment	-	Data files can contain comments between records. Comments are denoted by starting a line with one or more special characters, for example //. Specify one or more characters to denote a comment line. Qlik Sense does not load lines starting with the character(s) specified here.	Delimited files

Loading data into your Qlik Sense app

Once you have finished selecting data, you can load your data into your Qlik Sense app. How you proceed will depend on whether you load data with Add data or the Data load editor.

Add data

To load data using Add data, click Add data. This will open the data in the Associations view of the data manager. In the associations view, you can continue to add data sources, transform the data, and associate the tables in Data manager.

Data profiling is enabled by default when you click Add data. Data profiling does the following:

Recommends data associations.
Auto-qualifies common fields between tables. This adds a unique prefix based on table name.
Maps date and time fields to autoCalendar.

Tables are not associated on common field names automatically. You can associate tables in the Associations view.

Managing data associations

If you want to load the data directly into your app, click More and then disable data profiling.

When you add data with data profiling disabled, all existing data from data sources will be reloaded when you add the data. Tables will be associated on common field names automatically. Date and time fields will not be created.

Data load editor

To load data with the Data load editor, click Insert script once you are finished selecting the data. A load script is inserted into the script editor of the Data load editor. You can continue to edit the script in the script editor or you can click Load data to run the data load script.

Storing data from your Qlik Sense app in Google Drive

Using the Data load editor, you can store table data into your Google Drive repository.

Once you have loaded data into your Qlik Sense app, you can store your table data in Google Drive, by creating a new load script or editing the existing script. Using the SELECT command, specify a list of fields to be included in the upload, and then write a Store command to set the file path in Google Drive. Click Load data to run the data load script, and Qlik Sense will complete the upload process.

Syntax: Storing data in Google Drive

store MyTable into [lib://Google_Drive - account@gmail.com/root/filename.qvd] (qvd);

store MyTable into [lib://Google_Drive - account@gmail.com/Folder_ID/filename.csv] (txt);

Google_Drive in this example is the name of the Google Drive connection, and account@gmail.com is the Google Account. Files in the root folder must be prefixed with the /root/ path, and files in subfolders must be prefixed with the folder ID, which is a string of characters specific to the account, ex. 1PYpFlq8yhWKyuClDRSdky7B6QUM49MAc.

See the Store syntax for more detailed scripting instructions and supported file formats.

Limitations and known issues

When authoring load/store scripts for use with the Google Drive Web Storage Provider Connector, there are specific limitations to be aware of.

Folders and files with the same name are not supported.
Wildcard/masking syntax is not supported. You may only load specified individual files, or all files in a specified folder.
Google spreadsheets are not available in the Google Drive Web Storage Provider. They are available in the Google Drive and Spreadsheets Connector.

Reference - Google Drive documentation

You can refer to the Google Drive API documentation to learn more about the requirements and restrictions imposed by the Google Drive API.

Google Drive API Introduction

Did this page help you?

If you find any issues with this page or its content – a typo, a missing step, or a technical error – let us know how we can improve!

Leave your feedback here