User configuration file for sqlline

Use case: Being able to override the defaults for sqlline parameters globally

i.e, If I want sqlline to behave like mysql, and not truncate records, I want to have a global way of setting maxwidth=100000 for all connections, which gets applied anytime I use sqlline.

I think that with SQLLINE-386 and #389 sqlline is actually very close to being able to do that.

One way to implement it would be

• Define a default canonical connection config file location that is always read if present, unless overridden. (i.e $HOME/.sqlline/configuration)
• Define a ‘global:’ or similar section in the connection config file, and use the properties defined there to to override the sqlline default settings (the connection-specific settings would be applied on top if it)

[joshelser]

Yep, ssh is a great example.

The use-case we had here is that SQLLINE-66 caused some grief down in Apache Phoenix. Phoenix does an (incorrect per the JDBC spec) thing around DATE/TIMESTAMP which has caused Phoenix users to expect time components on date columns. SQLLINE-66 had (per JDBC) correctly formatted DATE columns as just “yyyy-MM-dd” whereas Phoenix would have previously returned “yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss”.

Now, they have a workaround via

!set dateFormat "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
!set timeFormat "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"

However, the reporter (to Istvan and I) of this issue can’t get all of their users to change their code to set this first. Thus, if we had a way that could “default” any sqlline session to use these configurations, that would go a long way.

[snuyanzin]

merged at https://github.com/julianhyde/sqlline/commit/27bab8f87a6e12040e74c2619afcafde296f779a thanks @richardantal