The Month field now exists only in the Sales table; the Budget table is linked only through the composite key Customer-Month.

When a Month value is selected, the selection set is evaluated first in the Sales table, producing the list of composite-key values that include the chosen month. Those key values propagate to the Budget table through association.

• Customers that have Sales for the selected month are always returned.

• For customers that lack a Budget row for that same composite key, Budget evaluates to null.

• Customers that have only Budget (no Sales) possess composite-key values that are never generated by the Sales table, so they are excluded from the result set.

Hence the table shows Customer names and Sales; Budget may be null or non-null.

B. Customers that have only Budget rows are not associated after a Month selection, so they are excluded.

C. Customers lacking Budget produce nulls; Budget is not limited to non-null values.

D. Month selection occurs in Sales, so rows with only Budget (and no Sales) are not returned; Sales, not Budget, can be null.

1. Qlik Sense® Help, “Synthetic keys and how to resolve them” – subsections “Composite key technique” & “Association behaviour after field removal”, help.qlik.com/sense/May2023/en-US/ (see Example 2, paragraphs 3-6).

2. Qlik Associative Engine White Paper, “Field selections and propagation across tables” – pp. 6-8, Qlik Tech International AB, 2023.

3. Henric Cronström, “Keys, Associations and Link-tables in Qlik”, Qlik Engineering Blog (white-paper attachment, rev. 2022-09-15), section “Selections made in a non-key field”, pp. 2-3.

4. Lundqvist & Ness, “Data Modeling for Qlik Sense”, Qlik Press, 2nd ed., 2021, Chapter 4 “Resolving Synthetic Keys”, pp. 78-80; Chapter 6 “Effect of selections”, pp. 111-113.