Q: autoJSONify

[mche]

Hi!

Let me stupid question. Do you have planned to autoJSONify from Perl data to PG json/jsonb data types and backwards?

Regards.

[turnstep]

Yes, it's been on our long-term todo for a while. Not sure when people will have tuits for this: it's a non-trivial task.

[machack666]

@turnstep are you thinking of rolling-your-own serialization/deserialization, or just hooking into JSON::XS or similar?

[turnstep]

We need to do our own parsing regardless, in the same way the arrays are done now. Whether or how to involve JSON::XS is somewhat secondary at the moment.

[waaeer]

JSON is probably the most important type for automatic conversion in DBD::Pg, but not the only one.
In some cases users may want to convert NUMERICSs to Math::BigInt or Math::BigFloat; dates/times and composite types also may be converted to something etc.

Do the thing I am thinking about is to allow custom conversion for the data types. A user may be given a possibility to specify converters for the data types (like TRANSFORMS in stored procedures). Something like
$dbi->set_transform('jsonb', &JSON::XS::encode_json,&JSON::XS::decode_json)
This would be a flexible universal solution.

[turnstep]

That sounds nice in theory, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice. The conversions happen in the Perl XS code, and involve low-level transformations of textual representations of certain types to Perl objects.

[ap]

Not sure when people will have tuits for this: it's a non-trivial task.

What areas does the complexity reside in?

[turnstep]

Not sure when people will have tuits for this: it's a non-trivial task.

What areas does the complexity reside in?

See pg_destringify_array inside of dbdimp.c. But will also need to create Perl hashes as well as arrays and wrap it all up neatly in an object we can hand back to the caller.