Problem

This proposal seeks to address two issues that affect many people using the current database API:

• The ResultSet API is too fine grained. It's hard to remember all the APIs to retrieve individual fields.
• It's easy to forget to close a ResultSet. This can result in locked databases. For more information, see: http://code.google.com/p/google-gears/issues/detail?id=40.

Solution

This can be solved by adding two new APIs:

class ResultSet {
  readonly property JsObject currentRow;
}

class Database {
  JsArray executeToArray(String sql, optional JsArray params);
}

Example usage:

var resultSet = db.execute("SELECT Name, NumCLs FROM GearsTeam");
while (resultSet.currentRow) {
  alert(resultSet.currentRow.Name + " has submitted " +
        resultSet.currentRow.NumCLs + " change lists!");
  resultset.next();
}

var rows = db.executeToArray("SELECT Name, NumCLs FROM GearsTeam");
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {
  alert(row.Name + " has submitted " + row.NumCLs + " change lists!");
}

Details

• currentRow is a property, not a method.
• This makes it a little more convenient because you don't have to declare a local variable if you don't need to.
• We should cache it in the resultset after the first access.
• It also doubles as a way to end the loop because it is null when the resultset is empty.

Alternatives

• Put something like toArray() on the resultset object.
• One downside of this is that toArray() is destructive -- it closes the resultset.
• Call executeToArray() something like select() instead.
• This is cute, but it's a little weird that you can actually pass an INSERT statement to the select() method, or a SELECT statement to the execute() method.