Re: Data type display

[Andreas Pflug <pgadmin(at)pse-consulting(dot)de>]

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Is there a reason why pgAdmin uses internal type names like int2 everywhere, 
> whereas the supposedly user-friendly approach would be that external names 
> like smallint should be used.  (Compare to the output of psql and pg_dump.)  
> You can obtain the friendly name using the backend function format_type, 
> which has been available at least since 7.3.  This would also avoid the need 
> for manual concatenating with "[]" for array types.

I wasn't aware of that function back those days...


> Also, the lists of data types you get when creating a table are not sorted 
> very well.  The beginning seems to be alphabetical, but the geometry types 
> are at the end.
>
> Perhaps, as an interface improvement, remove all the array types from the list 
> but instead make a separate checkbox "Array" instead.

pgAdmin uses the following query when retrieving valid types:

SELECT
typname, t.oid, CASE WHEN typelem > 0 THEN typelem ELSE t.oid END as 
elemoid, typlen, typtype, nspname,
  FROM pg_type t
  JOIN pg_namespace nsp ON typnamespace=nsp.oid
 WHERE typisdefined
   AND typtype IN ('b', 'd')
 ORDER BY CASE WHEN typtype='d' THEN 0 ELSE 1 END,
	(t.typelem>0)::bool,
	t.typname

serial and bigserial are added 'manually' if appropriate.

The goal was to have the types grouped: domain first, standard types 
next, then array types.

I'm not too happy about the combobox at all, it's much too big. I'd 
really like some hierarchical selection method, maybe a combobox with a 
dropdown tree instead of a list. Wanted to implement this for ages now...

Regards,
Andreas