Tasks
Page contents:
List tasks as tree
This command provides a hierarchical tree view of reload tasks and external program tasks, similar to what is available in QlikView.
The tree view can be enhanced with colors (see this page) and task details.
There are quite a few customisation options available when creating a task tree.
Note that some options are used when creating task tables, these are not applicable for task trees. Ctrl-Q will show an error when invalid combinations of options are used.
Here Windows Terminal is used to run Ctrl-Q.
Let’s first take a look at the options for thetask-get command:
Note:
Task trees are currently an all-or-nothing feature.
It is not possible to use the --task-id or --task-tag options when showing task trees.
Tree icons
If --tree-icons is used when starting Ctrl-Q emojis will be used to indicate the last known state for each task.
The used emojis are
| Descriptions | |
|---|---|
| ⏰ | Shown at the top of the tree of scheduled tasks. All tasks below this node have a time-based scheduled. |
| ✅ | Finished successfully. |
| ❌ | Failed |
| 🚫 | Skipped |
| 🛑 | Aborted |
| 💤 | Never started |
| ❔ | Unknown |
Text color
If --text-color yes is specified (yes is also the default value) colors will be used to make the created tree more readable.
--text-color no will create a plain-text tree (no colors).
Task tree details
The --tree-details option makes it possible to switch on/off individual task details. This can be useful to make the task tree easier to read.
The allowed values for this option are taskid, laststart, laststop, nextstart, appname, appstream.
Let’s say we want a task tree with the app name and next start time for the task:
Note how Ctrl-Q detects and warns about cyclic task dependencies:
Save tree to disk file
Under the hood the task tree is stored as a JSON structure.
It’s possible to save this JSON to disk:
Running the same command again, when the destination file already exists, results in a question to overwrite the file:
To forcibly overwrite the destination file the --output-file-overwrite option can be specified.
List tasks as table
This command provides a tabular view of tasks.
Tags, custom properties, schedules, triggers and references to other tasks are all included in the table.
This tabular task view can be shown on screen or saved to disk as Excel or CSV files.
The idea is that all information needed to recreate the tasks should be included in the table.
In reality a few more fields are included, for example app name for the app associated with a task.
The table view can be enhanced with colours (see this page) and task details.
There are quite a few customisation options available when creating a task tree.
Note that some options are used when creating task tables, these are not applicable for task trees. Ctrl-Q will show an error when invalid combinations of options are used.
Show task table on screen
Show a list of tasks on screen, including main task fields as well as any tags defined for the tasks.
Note:
It’s possible to get more information about tasks by adding additional values to the --table-details option.
Run .\ctrl-q.exe task-get --help to show a complete list of all options and their allowed values.
If --table-details is not specified all available information will be showed about the tasks.
This will result in a very wide table!
The --task-id and --task-tag options take a list of task IDs and tags, respectively.
When used only the tasks matching the specified task IDs and tags will be included in the created table.
These options can be used both when showing the task table on screen and when storing it on disk.
Example command using these options. Note the double quotes around the task tags:
Save task to disk file in tabular format
Saving a task table to disk file (Excel and CSV file formats supported) is done via the task-get command, adding --output-format table, --output-dest file, --output-file-format csv and --output-file-name <filename> options.
Here the most common task fileds together with task tags are included in the table written to a CSV file:
Save task to disk file as JSON
If task defintions should be read by some other system the task definitions can be saved as JSON.
Here only the most basic task info included via the --table-details option.
The resulting JSON file looks like this:
List tasks as network graph
This command provides an interactive network graph view of reload tasks and external program tasks.
First Ctrl-Q will retrieve information about all reload and external program tasks from the Qlik Sense repository service (QRS).
This includes information about last execution results for the tasks.
A web server is then started on the local computer where Ctrl-Q is running, serving a web page with the network graph in it.
A link to the web page is shown in the console where Ctrl-Q is running.
In the example below the link is http://localhost:3000.
Beta feature
Graph visualisation of Qlik Sense tasks is a beta feature.
Only a basic set of features are available at this point.
Performance is ok for small to medium sized Qlik Sense sites, but will slower for larger sites (many hundreds or thousands of tasks).
On Windows using PowerShell it can look like this:
Ctrl-clicking (on Windows. Use Cmd-Clik on macOS) on the link will open the network graph in a browser:
Node types
| Node type | Shape | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Schema trigger | Triangle | A schema trigger is a time-based task trigger. Orange if enabled, gray when disabled |
| Composite trigger | Hexagon | If a task’s composite trigger has two or more upstream triggers the composite trigger will be shown as a hexagon. Orange if enabled, gray when disabled. If the composite trigger only has one upstream task the composite trigger will not be shown in the graph. In this case the arrow from the upstream task will go directly to the downstream task. |
| Reload task | Rectangle | A reload task. Green when last reload finished successfully, red when last reload failed, gray when task is disabled, blue when task has never been started. |
| External program task | Elipse | An external program task. Green when last run finished successfully, red when last run failed, gray when task is disabled, blue when task has never been started. |
User interface
The user interface consists of a toolbar at the top of the page and the network graph itself.
The toolbar has a fixed position and size at the top of the page, while the network graph will resize to fit the available space below the toolbar.
Collapsing/expanding node clusters
Networks with many tasks can be hard to read.
To make it easier to read such networks Ctrl-Q offers the possibility to collapse/expand node clusters and/or leaf nodes.
- A node cluster is a group of nodes that are connected to each other.
- A leaf node is a node that does not have any downstream nodes.
Here is an example where the “Cluster leaves” button has been clicked a few times.
Note the circular task chain that becomes very easy to see when the leaf nodes are collapsed:
Expanding the leaf nodes again makes is done by clicking the “Uncluster all” button.
Legend and network graph configuration
The “Legend” button will toggle the floating (also moveable!) legend window on/off.
The “Network config” button will toggle a network configuration pane to the left on/off:
The network configuration pane makes it possible to fine-tune the parameters used when creating the network graph.
Things like gravity, spring stiffness, overlap stragegy etc. can be adjusted.
If the network graph is hard to read it can be worth trying different values for these parameters.
Tip
If things don’t work out as expected the “Refresh” button in the top toolbar will reload tasks from Qlik Sense and reset all visualisation parameters to their default values.Feedback
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