Re: feature request: expose sql formatter

Merlin Moncure wrote:
> hello all, I have a pie in the sky feature request here. I've been
> looking around for a sql 'beautifier' so that all our ddl which is
> stored in .sql files can be cleaned up. pgadmin has a much better
> formatter than the gook emitted by pg_dump...
>
> couple of questions here:
> * would it be possible to call pgadmin with a switch from the command
> line so it formats an sql file and exits?
>
> pgadmin -f foo.sql > foo_formatted.sql
>
> * the default options are pretty good, but what about improving the
> flexibility a bit (for example, sql keywords upper/lower case)? this
> would benefit everybody imo.
>
> if you guys are open this, could somebody give some hints about the
> complexity?

Hi Merlin,

The architecture of pgAdmin is such that your first suggestion would be
nigh-on impossible. Each object type has a class which is able to read
one or more objects of it's own type from the catalog, and provide a set
of members to access it's properties. There are additional member
functions to return the SQL, but this is reconstructed from the
properties of the object, not by re-formatting the output of
pg_get_viewdef or it's relatives.

The second suggestion is doable, but fairly invasive as you'd need to
get a range of conditional statements to format different parts of the
DDL created in each GetSQL() member. I'd be wary of accepting a patch to
do this due to the mess it would likely make of much of the code.

Regards, Dave.