Support renaming a field in a table model, i.e. renaming a DB column #4602

Problem to Solve

As the development of a server codebase evolves, it often happens that fields are renamed to better reflect their intent and content. However for fields defined in Serverpod table models this is not possible for a live service without a cumbersome multi-deploy and migration approach (create the new field, migrate the data from the old field and ensure all code updates both old and new the same way, then delete the old field).

Proposal

If the previous field definition in the .spy.yaml file was:

  resourceId: String?

The renaming could perhaps be expressed like this:

  instanceId: String?, altered_from(name: resourceId)

(The reason for calling it altered_from and using a named parameter name: is that perhaps we would want to support changing the type as well in the future, e.g. like altered_from(type: String).)

Use Case

As a user, I should be able to do simple updates to my database schema so that they are also simple to do in Serverpod.

Alternatives

1. Complex multi-deploy approach to migrate from one column name to another
2. Hack the Serverpod DB migration scripts manually, and probably needing to circumvent CI checks since the model code will mismatch either the old or the new naming (and this is not possible with a multi-instance server).

Additional context

No response

How experienced are you with this library?

Expert - Experienced and comfortable with using this library in complex projects

Are you interested in working on a PR for this?

• I want to work on this