Re: Patch: Auto-generate search_path statement for selected schema in query editor

I wonder if we're actually looking at it the wrong way, and what we really should consider is allowing the user to define a "template" block of SQL that's always added to any new SQL Query windows. That block could include placeholders that are replaced with context-specific values, or GUC variable values, e.g, the user could specify a template of:

SET search_path TO '%%SCHEMA%%, %%GUC:search_path%%'

Which would replace %%SCHEMA%% with the context-specific schema, and %%GUC:search_path%% with the current value of the search_path GUC.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that it can be used for a lot of different purposes - you can solve your problem, another user might have a default of "BEGIN;" to ensure they always run in an explicit transaction block etc, but perhaps more importantly, it saves us having to worry about what Sticky SQL or XXX Script features do, as it becomes an issue for the user to ensure their templates will work correctly in their environment.

That'd be a nice enhancement indeed. But using your example with the search_path, we'd still have the inconvenience of a redundant [public,myschema,public] path resulting from the template. Which OTOH is just a matter of taste (or is it?).

BTW, after adapting my code for re-ordering the search_path like we discussed and making it a configurable option (which was really easy, actually), I tested another unrelated idea: executing a query in the query editor repeatedly in user-definable intervals. I intended this primarily for monitoring tasks (pgAdmin's "server status" feature is great, but sometimes you just have more specific demands) or for watching logging tables being populated by an external application. This comes with a few UI-related problems though... all input fields should be made read-only while the timer is running, and the query editor for some reason is always brought to the foreground everytime the query has completed, which can be annoying. Also, certain menu items in the query editor should be disabled when the timer is running but the statement is not currently executed.
If this feature might be of broader interest, I'd be willing to look into some of these issues.

Oh, and when testing this, I found a small bug: open query editor, click into the SQL notepad, then click on the GQB tab... pgAdmin will crash. I haven't traced this down yet, just noticed it's reproduceable.