issue_comments: 1548617257

Were you picturing that the whole plugin config object could be returned as a promise, or that the individual hooks (like makeColumnActions or makeAboveTablePanelConfigs supported returning a promise of arrays instead only returning plain arrays?

The latter - that you could return a promise of arrays, so it parallels the "await me maybe" pattern in Datasette, where you can return either a value, a callable or an awaitable.

I have a hunch that what you're describing might be achievable without adding Promises to the API with something

Oops, I did a poor job explaining. Yes, this would work - but it requires me to continue to communicate the column names out of band (in order to fetch the facet data per-column before registering my plugin), vs being able to re-use them from the plugin implementation.

This isn't that big of a deal - it'd be a nice ergonomic improvement, but nowhere near as a big of an improvement as having an officially sanctioned way to add stuff to the column menus in the first place.

This could also be layered on in a future commit without breaking v1 users, too, so it's not at all urgent.

especially if those lines are encapsulated by a function we provide (maybe something that's available on the window provided by Datasette as an inline script tag

Ah, this is maybe the the key point. Since it's all hosted inside Datasette, Datasette can provide some arbitrary sugar to make it easier to work with.

My experience with async scripts in JS is that people sometimes don't understand the race conditions inherent to them. If they copy/paste from a tutorial, it does just work. But then they'll delete half the code, and by chance it still works on their machine/Datasette templates, and now someone's headed for an annoying debugging session -- maybe them, maybe someone else who tries to re-use their plugin.

Again, a fairly minor thing, though.