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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

What's your definition of No Code?

The quickest way to get a CSV file into Datasette these days is like this:

1. Put the CSV file in a Gist, e.g. https://gist.github.com/simonw/8a2494a3402450716f4c8129d280b...

2. Paste that into the "Load CSV" dialog on https://lite.datasette.io/ to get this shareable and bookmarkable URL: https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubuser...

I'm going to keep ticking away at making this as easy as possible for people (I have a paid SaaS product on the way, but I want people who just want to publish something small to free to be able to do so) but I'm interested in understanding what it would take to qualify as "no code" in your book.

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Datasette is great! I'm not very familiar, but here is my impression :

I guess my working definition is about the "default mode". So the (Datasette) Lite version could indeed be "no code" in a similar fashion to the "BI platforms" category above, that is, for read only advanced exploration.

In a deeper sense, "no-code" is also about how the software is designed for the ground up. This may include visually customising/configuring most of the settings/plugins and all those delicate UX touches for the "average-user".

Personally, I'm waiting for two things : better facets and support for multivalued columns (I really like my openrefine for local or polymersearch for online)

I'm thinking about faceting improvements at the moment - they're such a powerful feature and there's definitely room for making them work and look better.

What do you mean by multivalued columns?

Datasette currently does have support for faceting by JSON arrays, e.g. on this page: https://musiccaps.datasette.io/musiccaps/musiccaps_details?_...

> faceting by JSON arrays

Yep that's is it. I should have read that facet page in the doc (just used the wrong keyword for search months ago)

btw, I played a bit more with faceting, and it is actually (functionally) good !

Datasette is (going to be) the "mpv" of DBs : An open (in code and in extensibility) standard for reading them. And that plugins system is a godsend. I will certainly delve into it more.

I would consider datasette and its plugins nocode.

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