Using API with Grist Desktop

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I’m looking to use Grist Desktop as a table editor for local projects, and I noticed that the .grist file uses BLOB for most of the SQLite column types. I’m curious, therefore, if there is a way to programmatically extract these tables in a way that maps Grist’s type information onto them. The grist_api Python package would be one possible solution, but I haven’t been able to ascertain whether it works with Grist Desktop.

2

If you set types for your columns, the types will be reflected in the SQLite table. For example, for my own document, I see

sqlite> .schema NES_shopping_list
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "NES_shopping_list" (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, 
"manualSort" NUMERIC DEFAULT 1e999, 
"Title" TEXT DEFAULT '',
"URL" TEXT DEFAULT '',
"Price" NUMERIC DEFAULT 0, 
"Purchase_status" TEXT DEFAULT '',
"Price_CAD_" NUMERIC DEFAULT 0, 
"Currency" TEXT DEFAULT '',
"Play_status" TEXT DEFAULT '',
"Box_art" TEXT DEFAULT NULL, 
"text" TEXT DEFAULT '');

You are correct that the default type is blob, but that only happens if you don’t give the column a type in Grist.

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