The Bugzilla Query Page is the heart and soul of the Bugzilla user experience. It is the master interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system.

The first thing you need to notice about the Bugzilla Query Page is that nearly every box you see on your screen has a hyperlink nearby, explaining what it is or what it does. Near the upper-left-hand corner of your browser window you should see the word "Status" underlined. Select it.

Here is a example that how to make a few successful queries to find out what there are in the Bugzilla bug-tracking system itself.

1. Ensure you are back on the "Bugzilla Query Page". Do nothing in the boxes marked "Status", "Resolution", "Platform", "OpSys", "Priority", or "Severity". The default query for "Status" is to find all bugs that are NEW, ASSIGNED, or REOPENED, which is what we want. If you don't select anything in the other 5 scrollboxes there, then you are saying that "any of these are OK"; we're not locking ourselves into only finding bugs on the "DEC" Platform, or "Windows 95" OpSys (Operating System).

2. Basically, selecting anything on the query page narrows your search down. Leaving stuff unselected, or text boxes unfilled, broadens your search.

You see the box immediately below the top six boxes that contains an "Email" text box, with the words "matching as", a drop-down selection box, then some checkboxes with "Assigned To" checked by default? This allows you to filter your search down based upon email address. Let's put my email address in there, and see what happens.

Type "yourname@gmail.com" in the top Email text box.

3. Let's narrow the search some more. Scroll down until you find the box with the word "Program" over the top of it. This is where we can narrow our search down to only specific products (software programs or product lines) in our Bugzilla database. Please notice the box is a scrollbox. Using the down arrow on the scrollbox, scroll down until you can see an entry called "Bugzilla". Select this entry.

4. Did you notice that some of the boxes to the right changed when you selected "Bugzilla"? Every Program (or Product) has different Versions, Components, and Target Milestones associated with it. A "Version" is the number of a software program.

5. OK, now let's select the "Bugzilla" component from its scrollbox. 6. Skip down the page a bit -- do you see the "submit query" button? Select it, and let's run this query!

7. Congratulations! You've completed your first Query.