[CASSANDRA-6910] Better table structure display in cqlsh

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.1.1
• Component/s: Legacy/Tools
• Labels: lhf
• Assignee: Mihai Suteu
• Reporter: Tupshin Harper

Authors

Mihai Suteu

Reviewers

Robert Stupp

• Created: 23/Mar/14 16:08
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:31
• Resolved: 17/Jul/14 21:56

Description

It should be possible to make it more immediately obvious what the structure of your CQL table is from cqlsh. Two minor enhancements could go a long way:
1) If there are no results display the column headers anyway. Right now, if you are trying to do a query and get no results, it's common to need to display the table schema to figure out what you did wrong. Having the columns displayed whenever you do a query wouldn't get in the way, and would provide a more visual way than by describing the table.

2) Along with the first one, if we could highlight the partition/clustering columns in different colors, it would be much more intuitively
understandable what the underlying partition structure is.

tl;dr: the forms below should each have distinct visual representation when displaying the column headers, and the column headers should always be shown.

CREATE TABLE usertest (
userid text,
email text,
name text,
PRIMARY KEY (userid)
)

CREATE TABLE usertest2 (
userid text,
email text,
name text,
PRIMARY KEY (userid, email)
)

CREATE TABLE usertest3 (
userid text,
email text,
name text,
PRIMARY KEY ((userid, email))
)

Issue Links

• breaks: CASSANDRA-7613 Error when tracing query with 2.1 cqlsh
• breaks: CASSANDRA-7671 cqlsh: Error when printing results of conditional updates
• breaks: CASSANDRA-7891 Select an element inside a UDT throws an index error
• breaks: CASSANDRA-8258 SELECT ... TOKEN() function broken in C* 2.1.1
• is related to: CASSANDRA-8262 parse_for_table_meta errors out on queries with undefined grammars

Sub-Tasks

• Update cqlsh tests to support new colored output: Resolved