Re: Bytea as "Binary Data"

On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 8:43 AM, Colin Beckingham <colbec(at)kingston(dot)net>
wrote:

> Currently pgadmin4 displays bytea fields as "[Binary Data]".
>
> In searching the archives for the reason for this, I found some discussion
> on lengthy processing slowing down display. So a decision was made to not
> attempt to display the data at all, and since the data can be lengthy this
> makes some sense.
>
> While such binary data is not "readable", in the era of SHA hashes it is
> useful to be able to visually check that the right hash is in the right
> column using the first few text characters. We can of course do this in the
> Postgresql REPL or even in the old phpPgAdmin which usefully displays part
> of the 'escape' translation of the hash.
>
> Is there some concrete reason for not displaying such data, or is the
> community open to revealing a short stub which would be more helpful than
> no representation at all? Thanks.
>

I'm not opposed to showing something more useful than "[Binary Data]". The
question is, what exactly? In many cases it'll likely be unreadable garbage.

FYI, eventually I'd like to be able to try to detect the data type, so if
we find it's actually an image for example, we can display it (and
potentially have an editor cell that allows you to replace it).

--
Dave Page
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Twitter: @pgsnake

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