KoalaRainbow :: Web Interface aka Query/Visualization Lab
If you are like me, you probably like to be able to rapidly test
things. Some programming languages (ex: Python, every LISP/Scheme
derivative ever) have a Read-Eval-Print-Loop to make this
feasible. (Perl doesn't...) In any event, KoalaRainbow
ascribes to this goal. So, if you go to your MovableType
homepage, you should notice a list of plugins at the bottom.
Among those plugins will be KoalaRainbow. If you click on the
link, that will take you to the KoalaRainbow web interface.
Note that in order to use this interface you need to have permission on
at least one blog to edit the templates. The assumptions behind
this are:
- You only need to be able to play with queries if you can actually
modify templates to use them.
- If you can modify templates, you can get pretty much any data out
of the system that you want. Therefore, there's no real problem
that you might see something you shouldn't see.
Actually, it's all pretty simple. On the query page, you can
enter any query you want, press the button, and it will use Data::Dump
to print out the results of the query.
On the visualization page, there is a spot for queries and a spot for
visualization. In this case the query is strictly optional.
If it is present, its results will be used to populate the 'entries'
value in the MT context stash. Basically, this allows you to take
some variety of page in case the operation of your visualization
depends on it (via mtenv). It would depend on it if you are
trying to use a visualization that should work in a template using the
context in which it is embedded, rather than using purely standalone
data sources. The visualization spot is for you to drop in your
MTKRVisualization tag and all that goes inside it. This is parsed
in the same way that templates are parsed. Because of this you
must keep in mind that if you want to use comparison operators, you
must use { in place of <, and } in place of >, or things just
won't work.
Please see the examples page for thinks
you should be able to just paste in and have them do something (on the
visualization page).