Adding introspection to the PyPika query builder

[Ovid]

Adding introspection to the PyPika query builder

[wd60622]

yeah, I think returning strings would not be ideal for general usage.

What do you imagine the result would store if it was not the Table and Field instances? Those objects hold a little surround information but not much by design.

For instance,

from pypika import Table, Field

table = Table("table")
field_from_table = table.field
field = Field("field")

table alone doesn't store that much information
field_from_table has table information in table attribute
field is standalone which could be from any table without query context

[wd60622]

I think this sounds very useful. Do you think returning Table objects and Field objects instead of string would still be useful?

[Ovid]

@wd60622 I'd be happy getting objects back instead of strings, so long as I can extract the extra information. However, I suspect we'd want metadata objects and not just Table and Field objects. For example, if we later want to extend its capabilities, we might not want to change the underlying Table and Field objects.