Overview

What is Ctrl-Q and how can I use it?

What is Ctrl-Q?

The focus of Ctrl-Q is on slightly more complex use cases that are not handled out of the box by other tools such as Qlik’s official Qlik CLI tool or Adam Haydon’s Qlik CLI Windows tool.

Both are exceptional tools and extremely useful, but especially when it comes to interactions with the Qlik Sense engine they fall a bit short.

Ctrl-Q also tries to fill niches that are not covered by the various members of the Butler family of open source SenseOps tools.

The Butler tools each focus on a specific feature (or features in the case of the original Butler tool) and goes fairly deep in those areas.
For example, Butler SOS focus on getting real-time metrics and events out of Sense and into a wide range of target databases and monitoring tools.
Butler Sheet Icons creates sheet thumbnails for Sense apps - but offers lots of flexibility and power around that use case.

Cloud and client-managed Sense

Ctrl-Q works with both client-managed Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows and Qlik Sense Cloud.

Given Ctrl-Q’s background in the client-managed world, most commands focus on that environment.
Still, new use cases are added to Ctrl-Q with the cloud in mind, and over time it is expected that the number of cloud-specific features will grow.

What can Ctrl-Q do for me?

Ctrl-Q focus on specific, high-value uses cases that tend to be very time consuming and/or error prone to do manually.

The list of features include:

  • Get all current sessions, including user ID, virtual proxy, load balanced servers and more.
  • Delete all or some sessions for a given virtual proxy / proxy service.
  • Get complete definition of all reload tasks and external program tasks as tree view, network graph, tabular view or JSON. Show on screen or save to disk file.
  • Bulk import of reload and external program tasks from disk files. Optionally also import QVF files.
  • Build task chains using newly imported and/or existing tasks.
  • All options available in the QMC (and then some!) can be defined.
  • Bulk import of QVF files into Sense apps, including (re-)publishing of the apps.
  • Update custom properties for multiple tasks.
  • Import master dimensions and master measures from definitions in Excel file, including per dimension/measure colors.
  • Show complete definitions for all master measures in a Sense app.
  • Delete master measures from a Sense app.
  • Show complete definitions for all master dimensions in a Sense app.
  • Delete variables in one or more apps.
  • List complete defintions for all variables in one or more apps.
  • Delete master dimensions from a Sense app.
  • Show complete definition of all bookmarks in a Sense app.
  • Scramble fields in Sense apps.
  • Get load script from Sense app.
  • Create a custom property on all users and insert a value indicating how long it has been since the user last logged in. I.e. user activity buckets in a custom property.

As Ctrl-Q is completely command line driven it is very suitable to be used in CI/CD pipelines, with time savings, increased reusability and higher app quality as a result.

Maybe Qlik’s CLI tool will evolve to include more of these use cases and engine-focused features too - great if so.
Until then Ctrl-Q can hopefully make life a bit easier for Sense developers and admins out there.

Where can I find out more?

There are several blog posts on ptarmiganlabs.com where various Ctrl-Q features are examined in detail.
Everything from short overviews of new features to very thorough, step-by-step instructions for how to use Ctrl-Q to solve some challenging Qlik Sense related task.

Where should I go next?