Default Column Formatting

[Gus Power]

What are you building with SQLPage ?

A system that allows business users to easily view and query various management information.

What is your problem ? A description of the problem, not the solution you are proposing.

I find myself usefully populating tables using simple SELECT * FROM table but then invariably come back to improve the formatting of the columns - this leads to me having to list all the columns in the expression (and revisit them when I update the underlying database tables) in order to format them. There are a number of common patterns - the most frequent being the formatting of timestamps for created/updated/deleted e.g TO_CHAR(updated, 'DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI:SS') AS updated. There are also other patterns that appear often like building markdown links.

What are you currently doing ? Since your solution is not implemented in SQLPage currently, what are you doing instead ?

Explicitly listing and maintaining all columns in the table query so that I can format them using TO_CHAR or similar.

Describe the solution you'd like

A method for defining a column formatter and then applying it automatically to a query. It might look something like:

SELECT 
    'table' AS component
    ,'name' AS markdown 
    ,'pretty-timestamps' AS formatter

Describe alternatives you've considered

A few alternatives I've considered:

• suck it up and keep going :)
• add a pre-compiler that processes the .sql files to expand the SELECT * queries and add the appropriate formatting options
• try to minimise the noise by creating sql functions to perform the formatting logic in a single place

Additional context

There seem to be two prevalent patterns - one is simply by type, e.g. pretty print all timestampz, the other being by name and type, e.g. make markdown links from all bigint columns entitled customer_id. From a scope point of view I could see this being useful to apply to the system as a whole or in specific contexts (e.g. specific query or by path).