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Qlik App Settings Lost When Migrating Without Data Between DEV, UAT and PRD

Many Qlik developers hit the same wall when promoting an app across DEV, UAT and PRD: you export the application without data to keep the package light, import it into the next environment, and discover that a field setting like "Always one selected value" is silently gone. Nothing warns you. The app you deployed no longer matches the app you built, and you usually find out only when a user complains that a filter behaves differently in production.

The manual way: export without data, hope for the best

The standard promotion path is export-without-data (a purged QVF), then re-import in the target tenant. It's fast, but it's a black box. You can't easily see what the export kept and what it dropped, so field-level configuration, selection behaviour and other properties can quietly fall out of the package.

To catch it, teams end up doing manual QA on every promotion: open both apps side by side, re-select each field, re-check every 'always one selected value' and 'show frequency' toggle, and click through sheets in UAT and PRD to confirm nothing shifted. It's tedious, it doesn't scale across three environments, and a single missed setting still slips through to production with no audit trail of what changed or when.


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Why the settings slip through

The root problem is that the migration artifact isn't a faithful, reviewable definition of your app — it's an opaque binary that the export step reshapes. Without a stored, comparable definition of DEV, UAT and PRD, any difference between environments is invisible until it bites. There's no diff, no history, no way to prove the three environments are actually in sync.

The Gitoqlok way: promote through Git, keep every setting

Gitoqlok version-controls the full app definition as JSON and promotes it between environments with Deploy from Git — you pick the exact commit and rebuild the app in UAT or PRD from the same definition you committed in DEV, so field settings travel with it instead of being dropped. And before you promote, the Diff Viewer shows any difference between versions, turning a silent surprise into a reviewable change.

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