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From: Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2017 09:37:11 +0000
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Subject: Re: Autoformatting
To: Raffi Holzer <rholzer@pivotal.io>
Cc: pgadmin-hackers <pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org>
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Hi

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 3:02 PM, Raffi Holzer <rholzer@pivotal.io> wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>  When we were talking about auto formatting we were actually referring to a
> single button press doing all of these things to a large block of text. The
> use case here would be if you receive a large illegible query and paste it
> into the query editor it would either automatically auto-format or you would
> press a button and it would auto-format.

Oh, OK.

> We are trying to determine a few
> things. One, are there preferred formatting guidelines

Hmm, it seems I missed SQL when I wrote our (basic) coding standards:
https://www.pgadmin.org/docs4/1.x/coding_standards.html

By default (in my opinion), we should have 4 character indents, new
lines for logically distinct objects (e.g. columns or constraints on a
table), commas etc. at the end of the line, keywords in upper case,
e.g.

SELECT
    a,
    b,
FROM
    t
ORDER BY
    a,
    b;

However, that obviously becomes unwieldy in some cases, so common
sense is needed:

SELECT
    a, b,
FROM
    t
ORDER BY
    a, b;

There should of course be a limit on the number of columns listed per
line - but should the limit be a count or max width in chars? With a
CREATE TABLE statement I think it's clear that each column should be
on it's own line:

CREATE TABLE t (
    a serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    b text
);

In other words, we need to define (or adopt) a formal standard for
this, and then write a parser/formatter - which seems like a decidedly
non-trivial amount of work (FYI, I tried the Python format-sql module,
and it failed on ~80% of my tests - probably either because it doesn't
understand COPY or pl/pgsql).

> and two, how should
> this autoformatting be implemented? On a button press? Upon pasting in the
> text?

Definitely not on pasting - if you drop in a large script, it could
take far too long, plus you may not care, or be looking at the
original source in another tool and trying to mentally reconcile lines
or statements to each other. I would say it should be a
button/shortcut.

-- 
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company


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