Tutorial

Note

Much of the below in in the works. Keep tabs on the github repository for more immediate updates or if you’re interested in collaborating.

This page is meant as a more thourough version of the Quickstart. If you haven’t been through it yet, it is recommended that you do so before proceeding.

Process

cQuery is simple and depends on as little knowledge and setup as possible. As such, to get started with cQuery there are three steps to fulfill:

  1. Install cQuery
  2. Tag content
  3. Query content

Once set up, a more general workflow may look like this:

  1. Tag content
  2. Query content

Installation

To get started, install cQuery like this:

Content

cQuery is designed to work with tens of millions of subdirectories but for the purposes of this tutorial, let’s stick with a minimal set of possible matches.

$ cd c:/projects
$ mkdir spiderman/assets/Peter
$ mkdir spiderman/assets/Goblin

$ mkdir spiderman/shots/1000
$ mkdir spiderman/shots/2000

Advanced

Note

The following is on the roadmap for cQuery but isn’t part of it yet. We are looking for contributors interested in file-based search optimisations - if that’s you, contact us. If you know anyone, spread the word.

cQuery is designed to facilitate very large content hierarchies (> 20 million individual directories) and as such provides a few alternatives for optimisation.

No Optimisations

Per default, cQuery is designed to work out-of-the-box with little or no setup. This means making every query live and will in some cases be cause for a noticable slowdown depending on the amount of directories are involved in a query. For upwards queries, this is usually not noticeable (~0.001s/level) but downwards queries could potentially touch millions of targets and as such may take several minutes to complete.

Local Daemon

The simplest level of optimisation is one that indexes results during a query. Once a query has been performed, the results are stored in the currently running process and help speed up subsequent queries.

Dedicated Daemon

The next level of optimistation involves running a dedicated daemon that performs an either live, at a fixed interval or at events. The dedicated daemon has the advantage of being persistent across runs and facilitating a multi-user setup.

Central Deamon

Finally, the central deamon, like the dedicated daemon, is persistent but as opposed to the dedicated deamon the central daemon facilitates a multi-user/multi-site usage.