Re: Doing better at HINTing an appropriate column within errorMissingColumn()

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 7:29 AM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> Everyone is going to have an opinion on something like that. I was
> showing deference to the general concern about the absolute (as
> opposed to relative) quality of the HINTs in the event of equidistant
> matches by having no two suggestions come from within a single RTE,
> while still covering the case I thought was important by having two
> suggestions if there were two equidistant matches across RTEs. I think
> that's marginally better then what you propose, because your case
> deals with two equidistant though distinct columns, bringing into
> question the validity of both would-be suggestions. I'll defer to
> whatever the consensus is.

I agree this is bike shedding. But as long as we're bike shedding...

A simple rule is easier for users to understand as well as to code. I
would humbly suggest the following: take all the unqualified column
names, downcase them, check which ones match most closely the
unmatched column. Show the top 3 matches if they're within some
arbitrary distance. If they match exactly except for the case and the
unmatched column is all lower case add a comment that quoting is
required due to the mixed case.

Honestly the current logic and the previous logic both seemed
reasonable to me. They're not going to be perfect in every case so
anything that comes up some some suggestions is fine.

--
greg