As I wrote in Part 1 Chrome Developer tools is perhaps the most important tool for a Qlik Sense extension developer. Some important points in part 1:
- you should turn caching off in the network tab, and keep developer tools open to make sure files are not cached
- Qlik Sense client catches program errors in your extension, so if you need to see them temporarily check the box ‘Pause on caught exceptions’. You can’t keep this box checked all the time though.
In this post we will continue with some more useful stuff.
Checking web socket traffic
As you probably know communication with the Qlik Engine is over web sockets. You find the web socket in the Network tab, just click on WS and you will find it. Click on the websocket and then on messages, and you will see the communcation, something like this:
Lots of information, lots of transactions. Some things you should know:
- messages from client to server has a dark background, messages from server to client a white background
- all messages are in JSON format
- if you click on a message it will be displayed in a format that’s easier to read in the area below
- you can filter messages by typing in text in the field where it says ‘Enter regex..’
Connect request and reply
What you see in the web socket log is simply a list of all messages sent and received, in chronological order. Since commands are processed in paralell, the reply for a specific request might not at all be anywhere near the request. Request and reply are connected with the ‘id’ attribute (that’s a feature in the json rpc protocol, which Qlik Sense is built on). This means we can filter on the id attribute to find the reply for a specific request. If you try typing in “id”:1, in the filter box you will get request #1 and it’s reply:
Handling handles
So now we know how to find a request and it’s reply, but to really understand what’s happening we also need to understand handles.
Handles is a Qlik Sense specific concept, not part of Json RPC but an addition to it, made by Qlik. The QIX protocol is object-oriented, meaning that all commands are sent to an object. When you connect to Qlik Sense engine, the only handle available is the global handle, -1.
The first thing you do in most cases is call OpenDoc to open your Qlik Sense app (or Doc, as its called in the QIX documentation). If that succeeds you will get a handle (called qHandle) back in the reply. You can them send Doc commands to this handle (almost always handle 1). If you type in the filter “handle”:1, you will see all app commands used:
As you can see there is a lot of them. Most of them fetches or creates objects in the app, with GetObject or CreateSessionObject. You do not see the replies, only the requests, since the replies do not contain the handle. But if we instead filter by the id of one of the GetObject calls, (in my case id 13) we can see what happens:
As you can see in the reply there is a new qHandle in the reply, #5. So now we can filter on “handle”:5, and see what commands were sent to this object. If you want to know what handle is used for your extension, there is as far as I know no way to get that information from standard Qlik, but you can use my Chrome Extension Add Sense.
Find commands that invalidates object
Handles are used not only to refer to objects when you send commands, but also for invalidation. When you change selections (make a new selection, clear selection, apply bookmark etc) QIX engine tells you what objects are no longer invalid. It does this with the ‘change’ array (another addition to JSON rpc) which contains handles for the invalidated objects. So if I for example want to find commands that invalidated opbject 13, I can filter on “change”:\[.*13.*\] (note: a regex, since the handle can be at any position in the array):
We only get the replies for commands that invalidated the object, to get the actual command you need to use the id field to find the actual command and handle.
