issue_comments: 1065929510

Ok, I'm taking a slightly different approach, which I think is sort of close to the in-memory _metadata table idea.

I'm using a startup hook to load metadata / other info from the database, which I store in the datasette object for later:

@hookimpl def startup(datasette): async def inner(): datasette._mypluginmetadata = # await db query return inner

Then, I can use this in other plugins:

@hookimpl def render_cell(value, column, table, database, datasette): # use datasette._mypluginmetadata

For my app I don't need anything to update dynamically so it's fine to pre-populate everything on startup. It's also good to have things precached especially for a hook like render_cell, which would otherwise require a ton of redundant db queries.

Makes me wonder if we could take a sort of similar caching approach with the internal _metadata table. Like have a little watchdog that could query all of the attached dbs for their _metadata tables every 5min or so, which then could be merged into the in memory _metadata table which then could be accessed sync by the plugins, or something like that.

For most the use cases I can think of, live updates don't need to take into effect immediately; refreshing a cache every 5min or on some other trigger (adjustable w a config setting) would be just fine.