This patch improves tab completion's ability to deal with
valid variant spellings of SQL identifiers. Notably:
* Unquoted upper-case identifiers are now downcased as the backend
would do, allowing them to be completed correctly.
* Tab completion can now match identifiers that are quoted even
though they don't need to be; for example "f<TAB> now completes
to "foo" if that's the only available name. Previously, only
names that require quotes would be offered.
* Schema-qualified identifiers are now supported where SQL syntax
allows it; many lesser-used completion rules neglected this.
* Completion operations that refer back to some previously-typed
name (for example, to complete names of columns belonging to a
previously-mentioned table) now allow variant spellings of the
previous name too.
In addition, performance of tab completion queries has been
improved for databases containing many objects, although
you'd only be likely to notice with a heavily-loaded server.
Authors of future tab-completion patches should note that this
commit changes many details about how tab completion queries
must be written:
* Tab completion queries now deal in raw object names; do not
use quote_ident().
* The name-matching restriction in a query must now be written
as "outputcol LIKE '%s'", not "substring(outputcol,1,%d)='%s'".
* The SchemaQuery mechanism has been extended so that it can
handle queries that refer back to a previous name. Most completion
queries that do that should be converted to SchemaQuery form.
Only consider using a literal query if the previous name can
never be schema-qualified. Don't use a literal query if the
name-to-be-completed can validly be schema-qualified, either.
* Use set_completion_reference() to specify which word is the previous
name to consider, for either a SchemaQuery or a literal query.
* If you want to offer some keywords in addition to a query result
(for example, offer COLUMN in addition to column names after
"ALTER TABLE t RENAME"), do not use the old hack of tacking the
keywords on with UNION. Instead use the new QUERY_PLUS macros
to write such keywords separately from the query proper. The
"addon" macro arguments that used to be used for this purpose
are gone.
* If your query returns something that's not a SQL identifier
(such as an attribute number or enum label), use the new
QUERY_VERBATIM macros to prevent the result from incorrectly
getting double-quoted. You may still need to use quote_literal
in such a query, too.
Tom Lane and Haiying Tang
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/a63cbd45e3884cf9b3961c2a6a95dcb7@G08CNEXMBPEKD05.g08.fujitsu.local
Tom Lane
02b8048ba5