Feature: Allowing filtering which fields to pick in select

[KevinvOosterhout]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

At the moment when you use the SDK it forces a SELECT * FROM $thing. This prevents the scenario where you'd only want a single field to conserve data / compute / memory usage. This also prevents usage of relationships. for example ->tenant is not included by default.

Describe the solution

In my opinion the most pythonic way to do this is the following. Acccept a list[str] as a fields kwarg with the current * as a default fallback method. This would make implementation quite easy in the query, would be easy for the user to implement, and would not break existing implementation. This would allow this feature to be introduced without breaking changes.

Example:

db.select("user", fields=["name", "->tenant"])
db.select("user") # Would still work and when None is passed in the fields it should just do *

Alternative methods

I've seen the JS SDK does chained methods so db.select("user").fields(["name", "->tenant"]). This is probably not the best approach and more difficult to implement in Python.

SurrealDB version

3.0.0 for macos on aarch64

surrealdb.py version

main

Contact Details

kevin.oosterhout@nuxnova.io

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Code of Conduct for repository surrealdb/surrealdb.py

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[KevinvOosterhout]

I've added a draft PR with a PoC in the asyncws. If we can agree this is the correct way forward i can properly implement all the requirements.

I've ran a simple test which worked as expected

await db.select(
                "user",
                fields=["first_name", "id", "->user_tenant_members->tenant.{id, name}"],
            )

[martinschaer]

hi @KevinvOosterhout . There are some issues with this approach regarding SQL injection. The JS SDK for example, allows to specify fields, but only field names (e.g. first_name), not expressions (e.g. ->user_tenant_members->tenant.{id, name}). This is where that check happens: https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb.js/blob/main/packages/sdk/src/query/select.ts#L189-L195 , by wrapping the fields with type::fields.

Also, we are moving towards chainable functions. So this would look like db.select("user").fields("first_name").where(...)..., but this work has not yet started on the python side.

For now, one alternative is to use query instead of select, so you have full control of which fields and expressions to select.

[KevinvOosterhout]

Hi @martinschaer,

Thanks for the feedback. I can take a look at the chainable methods, possibly have a PoC around the start of the week.