Design for text data type

[kgodey]

Problem

Users will want to store data in a column with the text data type. We should allow them to do so and provide an intuitive user experience for them.

Proposed solution

We need a design for the following functionality:

• Displaying text columns in tables (I assume we don't need to change existing behavior for this, but I'm putting the requirement in here for the sake of completeness)
• Creating a new column with the text data type (which should also be the default for new columns)
• Changing an existing column to the text data type (including error states)
• Showing non-technical users a friendly name for the text data type. (The underlying Postgres data type could be VARCHAR, TEXT, or CHAR)

Options

Text columns will have the following options:

Specific to Text

• Maximum length (this will be validated at the DB level)

Common to all Columns

• Default value (this will be the default value of the column if the user doesn't enter anything)
• Allow empty values (whether the column is nullable)
• Unique (whether the values in the column have to be unique, validated at the DB level)

Grouping

Text columns will be able to grouped by:

• First letter of value
• First word of value

Filtering

Text columns will support the following filters:

• contains
• is
• is not
• starts with
• ends with
• does not contain
• does not start with
• does not end with
• is empty
• is not empty

[ghislaineguerin]

Specs posted at https://wiki.mathesar.org/e/en/design/specs/data-types-text