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gristlabs / grist-core

Grist is the evolution of spreadsheets.
https://www.getgrist.com/
Apache License 2.0
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[Enhancement] Views based on SQL queries #737

Open inducer opened 10 months ago

inducer commented 10 months ago

While I appreciate Grist's GUI niceties most of the time, sometimes I'd like to be able to drop to SQL just to look at some query results. I don't particularly care whether those views end up writable or whether they update automatically when needed. But just having Grist show me the results of a query (that I can do via the API) would be just oh so very nice.

To give you some concrete use cases to work with, see here. For context, this works on pretty broken data that comes out of a line-of-business application at my esteemed place of employment (in PDF form! :facepalm:). These queries are (so far) my best attempt at trying to make sense of this data.

I get that that's probably a power user thing and not what gets you the next million users... but... pretty please? :)

paulfitz commented 10 months ago

Thanks for the context on your use case @inducer !

I have an unofficial custom widget for viewing SQL queries - you can see an example of it in use here: https://docs.getgrist.com/eDAN66X5LiUF/The-Tastie-Eighties/p/3. The URL for it at the moment is https://paulfitz.github.io/grist-widget/sql

If you find it useful, it'd be great if you said so and said it loudly, since maybe it will nudge us to clean it up and document it :-)

inducer commented 10 months ago

This is the coolest thing ever! Thanks for sharing. :heart: I was initially a bit scared about whether integrating custom widgets would be fiddly and complicated, but I was delighted to see that it's not, when I tried it just now on an import of my "financial data" dataset. Nonetheless, that did present a bit of a hurdle for me, and that hurdle would not have existed if this very useful functionality were a bit more tightly integrated into Grist.