Need a way to delete a table

[deemson]

It would be nice to see this feature in TinyDB. I will gladly assist with it if you tell me where does it belong in the code.

[eugene-eeo]

I think what you're concerned with is that it's a slightly hairy problem though, to delete say, "table-one", do you do:

>>> tbl = db.table('table-one')
>>> tbl.delete()

(i.e. the table knows how to delete itself), or do you do:

>>> db.delete('table-one')

With that being said I think the latter is the better option, as it shows that the DB "owns" the tables, and is essentially a glorified dict of table-names to tables. You won't expect that an entry in a dictionary to know how to delete itself, would you?

[deemson]

>>> db.delete('table-one')

this looks nice

[msiemens]

db.delete looks ambiguous to me. Maybe db.purge_table('table-one') would be an option. We already have db.purge_tables() which removes all tables, so purge_table seems intuitive. What do you think?

[eugene-eeo]

👍 for db.purge_table

[deemson]

After learning the code, I see that there is no way to implement table deletion without adding a delete method to storage classes. Is this acceptable?

[msiemens]

I see that there is no way to implement table deletion without adding a delete method to storage classes

Why that? Couldn't StorageProxy handle that? I think it would be something like

data = self._storage.read() or {}
del data[self.table_name]
self._storage.write(data)

Of course you'd also have to update the table cache to account for the deletion, as far as I can see

[msiemens]

@deemson Are you on this? I'd like the next update of TinyDB to include this change too. No hurry, just FYI.

[deemson]

Yep, I'm on this, no worries.

[deemson]

#100 a pull request that implements this