issue_comments: 1683429959

The single biggest design challenge I've had with metadata relates to how it should or should not be inherited.

If you apply a license to a Datasette instance, it feels like that should flow down to cover all of the databases and all of the tables within those databases.

If the license is at the database level, it should cover all tables.

But... should source do the same thing? I made it behave the same way as license, but it's presumably common for one database to have a single license but multiple different sources of data.

Then there's title - should that inherit? It feels like title should apply to only one level - you may want a title that applies to the instance, then a different custom title for databases and tables.

Here's the current state of play for metadata: https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/metadata.html

So there's title and description - and I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure even I understand how those should be inherited down by tables/etc.

There's description_html which over-rides the description if it is set. It's a useful customization hack, but a bit surprising.

Then there are these six:

• license
• license_url
• source
• source_url
• about
• about_url

I added about later than the others, because I realized that plenty of my own projects needed a link to an article explaining them somewhere - e.g. https://scotrail.datasette.io/

Tables can also have column descriptions - just a string for each column. There's a demo of those here: https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures/roadside_attractions

And then there's all of the other stuff, most of which feels much more like "settings" than "metadata":

• sort: created - the custom sort order
• size: 10 for a custom page size for a specific table
• sortable_columns to set which columns can be used to sort
• hidden: true to hide a table
• label_column: title is an interesting one - it lets you hint to Datasette which column should be displayed when there is a foreign key relationship. It's sort-of-metadata and sort-of-a-setting.
• facets sets default facets, see https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/facets.html#facets-in-metadata
• facet_size sets the number of facets to display
• fts_table and fts_pk can be used to configure FTS, especially for views: https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/full_text_search.html

And the authentication stuff! allow and allow_sql blocks: https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/authentication.html#defining-permissions-with-allow-blocks

And the new permissions key in the 1.0 alphas: https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/authentication.html#other-permissions-in-metadata

I think that might be everything (excluding the plugins settings stuff, which is also a bad fit for metadata.)

And to make things even more confusing... I believe you can add arbitrary key/value pairs to your metadata and then use them in your templates! I think I've heard from at least one person who uses that ability.