issue_comments

This is pretty annoying for FTS because sqlite throws an error instead of just doing something like returning all or no results. This makes users who are unfamiliar with SQL and Datasette think the canned query page is broken and is a frequent source of confusion.

To anyone dealing with this: My solution is to modify the canned query so that it returns no results which cues people to fill in the blank parameters.

So instead of emails_fts match escape_fts(:search))

My canned queries now look like this:

emails_fts match escape_fts(iif(:search=="", "*", :search))

There are no asterisks in my data so the result is always blank.

Ultimately it would be nice to be able to handle this in the metadata. Either making some named parameters required or setting some default values.

Right now they look like this: yaml databases: fixtures: queries: neighborhood_search: params: - text In addition to being able to specify defaults, I'd also like to add other things in the future - most significantly the ability to specify a different input widget (e.g. textarea v.s. single-line input)

So maybe this looks like: yaml params: - name: text default: "" - name: age widget: number

I like that idea.

What about allowing default parameters when defining the query in metadata.yml? Something like: databases: fec: queries: search_by_name: params: - q default-param-values: q: "text to search" sql: |- SELECT...

For now, I'm using a custom database-<file>.html file that hardcodes a default param in the link, but I'd rather not customize the template just for that.

This is a good idea. I avoided this initially because it should be possible to run a canned query with a parameter set to the empty string, but that view could definitely be smart enough to differentiate between ?sql=...&param= and ?sql= with no param specified at all.