Using Go templates instead: #6429

What is this

Creates a view for workspace builds to add RBAC information to the object directly, removing the need for an extra database query.

This does create 2 WorkspaceBuild objects. One is WorkspaceBuild and one is WorkspacBuildThin. The thin version is returned by inserts/updates because you cannot insert into a view. I just expand the returned value immediately:

To return WorkspaceBuild with joined fields, it gets complicated with either a postgres function or rule.

Why do this?

Currently workspace_builds require fetching the related workspace to run RBAC checks. This requires an extra DB round trip. Instead, we should join this information to the build.

Cost

The cost of a view is using migrations to maintain the view. If a column is added to workspace_builds table, we need to update the view.

Alternative (please read this part!)

I was originally removing SQLc and just using SQLx directly. To reuse join information, I was going to use go templates. This required a bit of infrastructure to pull the queries into Golang. The final interface for this little package was quite clean.

Downsides

The go templates do not have great syntax highlighting support. On Goland, you can get a pretty good experience, but not on vs-code which a lot of our team uses.

The go template syntax highlighting breaks if you use go templates for dynamic queries, which is the alternative to using a view. This means making this a template looks like this.

{{ define "workspace_builds_rbac" }}
(
SELECT
	workspace_builds.*,
	workspaces.organization_id AS organization_id,
	workspaces.owner_id AS workspace_owner_id
FROM
	workspace_builds
INNER JOIN
	workspaces ON workspace_builds.workspace_id = workspaces.id
)
{{ end }}

-- To use the template above
{{ define "GetWorkspaceBuildByID" }}
SELECT
	*
FROM 
	{{ template "workspace_builds_rbac" }}
WHERE
	id = @build_id
{{ end }}

If this is preferred, I can go back to the sqlx route.

Upsides

• We can do dynamic queries. All CASE WHEN can be removed into go template conditionals that conditionally write additional WHERE clauses.
• Anonymously embedded structs for joined data.