Engineering Decisions

Danger

This page is archived.

June 2021

• We decided to use limit/offset pagination instead of cursor pagination.
  • Discussion: Pagination options
• We finalized on using TypeScript on the client.
  • Discussion: Using Typescript on Client

May 2021

• We finalized what we expect the Mathesar “Money” type to look like.
  • Discussion: Money type
• We’re going to store timezones with local timezone information, not as UTC.
• Discussion: Timezones
• We’re using NUMERIC Postgres types to power our general “Number” type on the roadmap.
  • Discussion: “Number” types
• We finalized implementation details for table creation from file imports.
• Discussion: CSV importing / type inference

April 2021

• Mathesar should function as a GUI to existing DBs, although it does a lot more. There should only be one source of truth for database-related data.
• Discussion: Mathesar: DB Client, or more integrated?
• We’re using Svelte for the frontend.
• Discussion: “Deciding the frontend framework” on GitHub Discussions
• The frontend and backend code will live in the same repository.
• Discussion: “Repository structure to accommodate frontend code” on GitHub Discussions
• We’re storing web application related tables in a separate database.
• Discussion: “Separate DB for webapp tables and user tables” on GitHub Discussions
• Additional Reasoning: We want to be able to reflect an entire database in Mathesar without having to modify it.

March 2021

• We’re using SQLAlchemy to interact with user-defined database objects rather than Django models.
• Reasoning: We don’t want to define user-defined database objects in code, we want the database to be the single source of truth and reflect what’s there.
• We’re using Django and Django REST Framework for the web application backend.
• Reasoning: We know it well and can build with it quickly.
• We’re using Python for the backend.
• Reasoning: We know it well and can build with it quickly.