Re: [bug-recutils] Recutils - User Feedback

[John Darrington]

Thanks Jose,

It sounds like you have it all planned then.

I have some improvements to recutils.texi  (nothing major yet - just some typo 
corrections)
How would you like to receive them? as patches? ona git branch? ...

J'

On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 02:05:57PM +0200, Jose E. Marchesi wrote:
     
     Hi John.
     
         Having read through the user manual over the last couple of weeks, 
         played with recutils a little, and of course attended Jose's 
         excellent presentations,  my opinions on Recutils are as follows:
     
     Thanks for the feedback! :)
         
         1. Recsel can perform a single join only.
         
            It would be extremely useful to be able to perform a query joining 
3 or more
            record types at once.  Eg:
         
            recsel -t Thing0 -j ThingA,ThingB -j ThingD file.rec
         
            My idea here is that ThingA and ThingB are foriegn keys in Thing0, 
whilst
            ThingD is a foriegn key in the result of the first join.
         
            I thought I could work around this limitation with something like
         
            recsel -t Thing0 -j ThingA -d file.rec | recsel -t Thing0_ThingA -j 
ThingD
         
            but it seems not.  Maybe it could if the -d flag was a little
            more intelligent... 
     
     That is the idea.  The implemenation of -d and the joins is not
     complete: it must create a record descriptor with the proper definitions
     so several recsels can be chained in a pipeline. 
     
     We could also support the first syntax as well, quite easily: it is a
     matter of chaining several calls to the API function rec_db_query.
           
         2. Recfmt has limited ability.
         
            For example some kind of conditional syntax would make it a lot 
more powerfull:
          
            Dear {{$case Gender 'Male')Sir 'Female')Madam}},
         
            of course there are ways around this problem, but that involves 
makeing the database
            architecture more complex.
     
     Yep.  A more powerful macro language for recfmt is in the TODO.  See
     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-recutils/2011-05/msg00019.html for
     a design I worked out some time ago.
         
         3. Date expressions could be somewhat more flexible.
         
            For example, the ability to match against only one field in a date.
         
            # Select all those people who have birthdays in March
         
            recsel -e "Date-of-Birth >> '01 March *' && Date-of-Birth << '31 
March *' file.rec
     
     Hmm.  Another pending feature is the support of "scalar functions" in
     selection expressions, in the same way they are supported in other
     database systems.
     
     Having scalar functions would probably fix the issue, because we could
     add functions like Year(DATE), Month(DATE), Dady(DATE), etc.
     
     -- 
     Jose E. Marchesi         http://www.jemarch.net
     GNU Project              http://www.gnu.org

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