Bulk export/import of reload tasks in client-managed Qlik Sense

The latest version of the open source tool Ctrl-Q can both export full reload task definitions to a CSV or Excel file, as well as import tasks from such files.

Might seem like a trivial thing but it's really a game-changing enabler for lots of interesting use cases:

• Backup all tasks to a file once per day. Makes it trivial to recover accidentally deleted reload tasks.
• Ensure DEV, TEST and PROD Qlik Sense servers have the same ETL chains set up.
• Deploy the same set of tasks to multiple Sense environments.
• Define ETL chains in a Git controlled definition file that is automatically sent to Sense whenever updated. Something like DevOps for reload tasks.

Ctrl-Q tries to be as opaque as possible, while at the same time offer a lot of flexibility. A single command should perform some high-value task that would be difficult and/or time consuming to do manually.

Exporting all reload tasks to a CSV file (Excel also possible) looks like this (using PowerShell, Sense server is found at 192.168.100.109):

.\ctrl-q.exe task-get `
--auth-type cert `
--host 192.168.100.109 `
--auth-user-dir Internal `
--auth-user-id sa_api `
--output-format table `
--output-dest file `
--output-file-name tasks.csv `
--output-file-format csv

Great, with a complete definition of all reload tasks now available in tasks.csv, we can create new tasks based on the info in that file:

.\ctrl-q.exe task-import `
--auth-type cert `
--host 192.168.100.109 `
--auth-cert-file ./cert/client.pem `
--auth-cert-key-file ./cert/client_key.pem `
--auth-user-dir Internal `
--auth-user-id sa_api `
--file-type csv `
--file-name tasks.csv

Ctrl-Q supports anything you can do with respect to reload tasks in the QMC, plus some more. It's for example possible to link a newly created reload task to either some other newly created reload task, or to an already existing reload task.

Does it work? Yep, check out this video: