2.1 KiB
Intro
I think the main benefit to recutils is having a human readable, plain-text database that you can edit.
Querying and inserting is okay.
I don't have a use case for using Joins on records, but the fact that you can means that recutils is pretty robust
I think that recutils could be a really good format for easily tracking data in version control. It is a good "source" database that can then be exported to csv and SQL. csvkit, e.g., can output straight to sqlite
Sorting
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:26:47 -0700
Okay check this out.
You can sort your fields at query time by passing the --sort Key option to recsel. And you can set a %sort Key default in the recfile itself. But sorting can only ever be ascending. Says so right in the docs.
The sorting is always done in ascending order...
https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/manual/Sorted-Output.html#Sorted-Output
I want a blog-style list of records with the most recently updated at the top, so I need my records in descending order. I settled on this craptastic workaround of querying my records sorted by Updated, convert to CSV, convert to JSON, jq 'reverse', convert back to CSV, and convert back to recfiles. (I only bother going all the way back to recfiles because I already wrote the recfile template I want to use to generate markdown.)
Here are the relevant snippets from my justfile:
# featuring descending sort!
markdown:
recsel -S Updated {{database}} | rec2csv | csvjson | jq 'reverse | map(.Notes |= gsub("\n"; "\n\n"))' | in2csv -f json | csv2rec | recfmt -f templates/markdown.template
# html out
html:
just markdown | pandoc -t html --toc -s --metadata title="Games!" -B templates/before.html -A templates/after.html -o dist/games.html
This seems like a huge oversight of recsel. I can't imagine I'm the only person who wants control over the order of their sort!
Templates
You can use any selection expression in the slots, including conditionals and string concatenation.
-https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/manual/Templates.html#Templates
...no you can't