issue_comments: 999831967

I think I might be able to clean up a lot of the stuff in here using the render_cell plugin hook: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/blob/6b1384b2f529134998fb507e63307609a5b7f5c0/datasette/views/table.py#L87-L89

The catch with that hook - https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/plugin_hooks.html#render-cell-value-column-table-database-datasette - is that it gets called for every single cell. I don't want the overhead of looking up the foreign key relationships etc once for every value in a specific column.

But maybe I could extend the hook to include a shared cache that gets used for all of the cells in a specific table? Something like this: python render_cell(value, column, table, database, datasette, cache) cache is a dictionary - and the same dictionary is passed to every call to that hook while rendering a specific page.

It's a bit of a gross hack though, and would it ever be useful for plugins outside of the default plugin in Datasette which does the foreign key stuff?

If I can think of one other potential application for this cache then I might implement it.

No, this optimization doesn't make sense: the most complex cell enrichment logic is the stuff that does a select * from categories where id in (2, 5, 6) query, using just the distinct set of IDs that are rendered on the current page. That's not going to fit in the render_cell hook no matter how hard I try to warp it into the right shape, because it needs full visibility of all of the results that are being rendered in order to collect those unique ID values.