Output columns excessively wide

[foamrider]

Hi

I'm trying out dadbod and dadbod-ui. I'm currently connected to a MSSQL instance and the connection works great, but I'm having an issue with the output format.

The output of 5 columns is 5004 chars, and if I select 1 column, the width is 1000 chars, even if the content of all rows are max 36 chars (uuid). This means that I'm practically unable to view more than one column at the time.

This is my current Lazy config:

    {
        "kristijanhusak/vim-dadbod-ui",
        dependencies = {
            { "tpope/vim-dadbod", lazy = true },
            { "kristijanhusak/vim-dadbod-completion", ft = { "sql", "mysql", "plsql" }, lazy = true },
        },
        cmd = {
            "DBUI",
            "DBUIToggle",
            "DBUIAddConnection",
            "DBUIFindBuffer",
        },
        init = function()
            vim.g.db_ui_use_nerd_fonts = 1
            vim.g.db_ui_show_help = 0
            vim.g.db_ui_win_position = "right"
        end,
        keys = {
            { "<leader>Dt", "<cmd>DBUIToggle<cr>", desc = "Toggle UI" },
            { "<leader>Df", "<cmd>DBUIFindBuffer<cr>", desc = "Find Buffer" },
            { "<leader>Dr", "<cmd>DBUIRenameBuffer<cr>", desc = "Rename Buffer" },
            { "<leader>Dq", "<cmd>DBUILastQueryInfo<cr>", desc = "Last Query Info" },
        },
    },

Is there a config or setting I'm missing, or how can I solve this? Any help is deeply appreciated

EDIT: Testet with a PostgreSQL connection, and with this it's working as it should.

[arpan3t]

The SqlServer adaptor is using sqlcmd utility to execute the query. By default sqlcmd adds trailing whitespace based on the table schema. For example, if you have a table with columns:

FirstName (varchar(50), null)
LastName (varchar(100), null)
UserName (varchar(200), not null)

sqlcmd will return columns with max(record value) - actual record value = trailing whitespace. Assuming an example record for the example table:

FirstName	LastName	UserName
John	Doe	JDoe

The FirstName column would have 50 - 4 = 46 trailing whitespace. You can add the -W argument to have sqlcmd remove the trailing whitespace, but that introduces another formatting issue. Since this plugin is taking the output --> writing to a temp .dbout file --> opening the file in a new buffer, there's no custom formatting involved. A function that gets the max length of values per column and adds some padding would be the best way to go about a solution, but I'm not sure how taxing that would be on queries that return a lot of records and I'm also not sure how that would be done using vim.

Sorry I don't have a solve for you, but you can see what adding the -W argument does by adding + ['-W'] to the end of this line:

vim-dadbod/autoload/db/adapter/sqlserver.vim

Line 56 in 9f0ca8b

return db#adapter#sqlserver#interactive(a:url) + ['-i', a:in]

[foamrider]

Thank you, I added the flag for now. Loosing the formatting is better than having to scroll thousands of chars horizontally. I'll try to do some more research too.

[seblyng]

Is there any way currently to add custom parameters in my config without changing the source code directly?

Couldn't find a builtin way, but of course, I can just do something like this (I want -k option on)
~/.local/bin/sqlcmd

#!/bin/bash

/opt/homebrew/bin/sqlcmd $@ -k

and then make sure that it is in PATH before the original sqlcmd. If you only want it to apply in neovim for example, you can do something like:

vim.env.PATH = vim.fn.expand("~/.local/bin") .. ":" .. vim.env.PATH