Re: Export to [application]

Hi Chris,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Gamache [mailto:cgg007(at)yahoo(dot)com]
> Sent: 13 February 2004 17:41
> To: pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [pgadmin-hackers] Export to [application]
>
> I apologise if I'm resurrecting a dead horse, only to be
> beaten once and then reburied. I apologise if I am hijacking
> a current thread. (I did dig through the archives to see if
> there was a recent discussion on these issues...) Thirdly, I
> apologise for the first apology's graphic depiction of a
> decaying horse corpse. :)

I think the last apology was more graphic than the sentence it was
apologising for!

> There are two features missing from PgAdmin III that were
> well used in PgAdmin
> II:
>
> Being able to edit rows from a query, if not for the edit
> capability,

There are various ways to shoot yourself in the foot with this code, and
despite that part of pgAdmin II being one of the most complex and worked
on bits of code, it was still chock full of errors waiting to happen. We
did not, and do not want to repeat that with pgAdmin III, hence the
separate edit grid (which now has filtering and sorting).

> then for being able to copy the contents of cells
> to the clipboard. We can talk about that some other time.

Now that is a useful feature, which we do intend to implement.

> The other feature was the Export to [application] feature. (I
> know, There IS an export to file feature.)
>
> Export to Excel was, by far, the best feature of PgAdmin II.
> In one click, I could have my data thrown directly into a
> table. I understand that PgAdmin III does not know nothing of
> COM, or OLE. However, PgAdmin III CAN deal with MIME.
> There shouldn't be a problem with creating a MIME bridge to
> Excel with a binary export of an Excel table (with proper
> column types, etc.), or even a delimited text file. In
> windows, explorer is smart enough to know what application
> needs to be launched to read a specific file. A Linux Window
> Manager should be able to do the same, and if not, then a
> launch app could be written to launch an application with the
> contents of the exported file piped to it.

Hmm, I doubt pgAdmin will ever create a binary Excel file. Perhaps the
most flexible option (and most compatible with different window
managers) would be to allow the user to pre-define a filetype and path
to application so that when an export is run, the app is then fired up
and passed the filename.

Regards, Dave.