Querki Explorer

So far, we've shown a bunch of QL expressions, and I hope you are beginning to see how QL works. But it takes some practice to get the hang of it, and that can be a bit intimidating. Querki Explorer is there to help make that easier.

You can get to Querki Explorer from any page, with the "Explore..." pick under the Actions menu:

This displays Querki Explorer:

(That currently says "The Subway Game" in the smaller text box because I started from the front page of my Space. You can invoke Querki Explorer from any Thing, and it will use that Thing as the context being passed into your QL expressions. We're not going to worry about that now, though.)

I want to create a page that shows all of the Archetypes, and their Factions. The rule in Querki Explorer is always start simple, so let's just list the Archetypes to begin with. I try out a simple QL Expression, and press Tab:

That worked, but it's kind of hard to read. How about if I turn it into a bullet list?

Okay, that's better. I'm going to want to do more on each of those lines, though, so let's insert a text stage:

As a rule of thumb, inserting ""____"" doesn't do anything except turn the received context into QText (remember that four underscores means "display the received context"), but it provides a framework to put more things into. Each time the text stage gets invoked, it'll be for one Archetype. So now, I can add a QL Expression inside that, to show the Factions for that Archetype:

That's pretty much the information I want, but I'd like it to be more readable. Let's tweak the formatting:

Excellent! That's the information I wanted. But what I really want is an actual page, that I can come back to as the Space grows. That is what the "Make a Page" button is for. I press that, and Querki turns my QL expression into a Thing, giving me the Instance Editor for it:

I give my page a Display Name, press Done, and I have my page:

That's most of it. Querki Explorer is the easiest way to learn QL, to poke around in your Space on an ad-hoc basis, and to create pages that show complicated queries. As soon as you've put some data into your Space, I recommend playing with it.

The above showed how to build a live page using the "Make a Page" button; this page will update automatically as I add more Archetypes and Factions. But what if I wanted to save a snapshot of the data instead, so I remember what the results looked like right now?

This is what the "Save Results" button is for. If I press that instead, Querki creates a new Thing, but that Thing contains the QText output of my QL Expression, rather than the expression itself:

I name that and press Done, and I get a page that looks just like the other one:

However, this page will always look like this: as I add more Archetypes and Factions, it won't change. This isn't useful as often as Make a Page, but it's occasionally very useful to have a permanent record of your data.