[DB-SIG] Again a question about the API

[Michael Lorton]

> From:	Oliver Andrich [SMTP:andrich@fga.de]
> Sent:	Monday, September 29, 1997 11:10 AM
> what do I means the following passage to me and what
> relevance has this for the API.
> 
> "...Each 7-tuple contains information describing each result column:
> (name,
> type_code, display_size, internal_size, precision, scale, null_ok).
> ... Note:
> this is a bit in flux. Generelly, the first two items of the 7-tuple
> will be
> present; others may be database specific."
> 
> Why do we need something like this description thing? I convert all
> the values
> returned by the database to native Python values as soon as you query
> the
> database. 
> 
I can tell you why we put it there and what we use it for.  Say you want
to write a general-purpose table display or editing mechanism.  You can
execute (but not fetch) "select * from tablename" and then use the
description to build a form, perform minor edit-checking, that sort of
thing.

M.


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