Proposal: Format SQL Query option in the Native Query Editor

[sowrabh]

Proposal

One minor annoyance today in using the Native Query Editor in Metabase is the lack of an option to format/prettify queries.

So I propose to add a Format Query option to the Native Query Editor(See screenshot below for a mockup). If this is something that is of interest to the community, I can help contribute to the same.

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[ajubin]

Hey,

I'm writing a lot of sql queries for custom dashboard and reports, I'd love to see a "format SQL" button to clean my mess 🧹

I've started to look at the possibilities, from my understanding we should modify this file frontend/src/metabase/query_builder/components/NativeQueryEditor.jsx to add a library like this one https://github.com/sql-formatter-org/sql-formatter

The main issue here, is to support the placeholders like {{some_input}}, {{#ref_to_another_table}}, [[AND optionnal_condition]] but the library proposed can't handle those special tokens.

I think one should dig into SQL parsers to properly format and lint the specifities of the metabase's SQL.

The facebook SQL editor daiquery seems to handle this, see here in SQL Editing section

Still, you can try the other formatting options here https://sql-formatter-org.github.io/sql-formatter/

Does anyone has more info on this ?

[lucasgadams]

Any update on this? Would be really nice!

[lucasgadams]

@ajubin as a former meta employee, i can say that Daiquery is honestly amazing and supported a lot of very nice things. Automatic formatting and automatic linting looking for errors are two of the main things I feel matabase is lacking. Been looking for a replacement for Daiquery since i left...

[ohld]

Is it possible to force SQL formatting for all SQL questions? I don't like when my users create unreadable SQL queries and don't CAPITALIZE reserved words like SELECT, FROM and WHERE