Download database button in dev tool

[ghost-458]

Would it be possible to create a button to download the sqlite database from the dev tool? Currently I'm running adb shell run-as <my package identifier> cat app_flutter/<my db name>.sqlite > app_database.sqlite. This works fine but it can get somewhat tedious to do.

I haven't looked into it too deeply, but could it work like this?

1. adding an action to dump the database in https://github.com/simolus3/drift/blob/develop/drift/lib/src/runtime/devtools/service_extension.dart
   • e.g. a new action 'dump-database' would grab the file, then post an event w/ the dumped file
   • there might be a limitation on the data length, tbd
2. in the dev tool, invoking a save file dialog (similar to how you can dump memory snapshots), then saving the data received from the posted message?

If this is possible and seems like a reasonable path, would you accept a PR for this? This probably wouldn't really work for other database types, but it'd be helpful for sqlite files.

[simolus3]

I like that idea 👍 And contributions for this would definitely be welcome. I agree on putting this into the service extension as a new action. I'm also not sure about data length - I assume we'd also have to encode data as base64 since it's all JSON in the end.

One implementation note: Since SQLite database may be split across multiple files (like an -shm and -wal file if write-ahead logging is enabled), I'd suggest an implementation that:

1. Picks a new random filename in a temporary directory.
2. On the main database, runs VACUUM INTO <that file>.
3. Then exports the secondary copy as a file.

That should at least be a good option on native databases. I'm not sure what we'd do on the web yet, but I may be able to get something like this to work there as well.