[Developers] Creating types through mqlwrite

[Christopher R. Maden]

Michael Callaghan wrote:
> OK thanks for the replies.  Perhaps manual type creation and modification on
> freebase.com coupled with programmatic topic creation and querying on the
> sandbox is the only way to go during testing and development, although I'm
> still unsure what errors could be made during type creation and what
> problems such errors would cause.

Types are just Freebase objects with types and properties of their own.
 Creating nonsensical shapes that claim to be types can cause MQL to get
confused and can cause the Web client to fail to display and manipulate
them correctly.  Properties need to be created with the right shapes,
especially with master and reverse relationships.  Some types in bases
have associated views.  Etc.  The Web client does a lot of magic to
ensure that the correct shapes are created in the graphs when creating
or modifying types and properties; replicating this process via manual
MQL writes is fraught, and even Metaweb staff sometimes screw it up.

~Chris
-- 
Chris Maden, text nerd  <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
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