Add support for storage of primitives such as lists and dicts

[Widdershin]

Can be achieved by storing repr of data and using ast.literal_eval to parse.

[gthole]

Perhaps a formal serializer/deserializer instead of ast.literal_eval? Literally evaluating opens the door for a number of evaluation bugaboos.

If there's support for typed fields, one such field could be a JSONField that could store any dict/list serializable to JSON, which is guaranteed safe.

[Widdershin]

Yeah, further thinking on this has lead me to the same conclusion. Typed fields seem like the way to go. Right now I'm not even sure if the types of ints/strings are preserved.

[gthole]

Not sure what you mean by "preserved", but if the field classes implement serialize and deserialize methods, it doesn't matter so much what GoogleDocs does. Perhaps looking vaguely like:

class DateTimeField(BaseField):
    def format(self, value):
        return value.isoformat()

    def parse(self, value):
         return datetime.datetime.strptime(value, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f%Z")


class IntField(BaseField):
    def format(self, value):
        return str(value)

    def parse(self, value):
        return int(value)

Of course, there should be validation/exception handling etc, and there's the chance that someone could directly (on the web or otherwise) modify the value of a typed column cell to something incorrect and butterDB should handle that gracefully.

[Widdershin]

Definitely thinking along the same lines here. I will probably include this as part of the rewrite.

[gthole]

I don't want to belabor this point, but a further advantage of typed fields like this would be a fairly direct path for ForeignKey fields (corresponding to row numbers, preferably expressed as spreadsheet formula names).