Re-vamping the history tab

Hi Hackers,

We want to give you a heads up on some of the changes we are planning and
get your input on the implementation plan.

The Redmine issue is here: https://redmine.postgresql.org/issues/2282

Over the past month we have been doing many user interviews and one of the
major asks is that the History tab could store the complete query text.
From this feedback we started several threads on the design:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAPG3WN7YxVO+n3qbDOWQBWY0rkscq1ar-5V-PJBSEPPZNsT_qw@mail.gmail.com
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAPG3WN6yLGkD8DkAvdO0MWnNXFEisU5UXJgrLX%3D-kcMnrwaT2A%40mail.gmail.com

The user level, here are the changes we want are:
Complete query text stored in the History tab
Complete messages text stored in the History tab
Redesign of the tab in order to allow for both of the above in an easily
browsable format.

*Implementation Plan*

In order to accomplish this the plan is to rip out the existing History tab
code, and rewrite it in React.

Why React:
React gives us better state management, an ability to ensure that we are
rendering consistent state in the history feature. React is highly
performant with a shadow-dom that re-renders only changed components. It is
also modular and easy to create components that are self-contained and
reusable.

Why rip out history as it exists:
We want to test the history feature as we build it and it’s not currently
built in a way that is testable. It is baked into sqleditor.js and not well
isolated from other features.

As previewed in the design, the setup is quite different and we believe it
will be faster to re-write this feature than to make these changes in-place.

Also:
We will need a JS build step in order to pull in React (or any framework)
as we do not want to add it as a vendorized dependency because of its size.

Pre-feature-parity commits:
Since we are re-writing this history feature, we will be submitting patches
as we build it to regularly communicate our progress before we have one
gigantic patch.

Once we have achieved parity, we will create new redmine stories to bring
in the additional improvements such as highlighting failed queries and
making it easy to copy the historical query.

Thanks,

The Pivotal PgAdmin4 Team