Documentation for the dclient insert feature, refs #8

README.md

@@ -7,6 +7,13 @@
 
 A client CLI utility for [Datasette](https://datasette.io/) instances
 
+## Things you can do with dclient
+
+- Run SQL queries against Datasette and returning the results as JSON
+- Run queries against authenticated Datasette instances
+- Create aliases and store authentication tokens for convenient access to Datasette
+- Insert data into Datasette using the [insert API](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/json_api.html#the-json-write-api) (Datasette 1.0 alpha or higher)
+
 ## Installation
 
 Install this tool using `pip`:

docs/authentication.md

@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
+(authentication)=
+
 # Authentication
 
 `dclient` can handle API tokens for Datasette instances that require authentication.

docs/index.md

@@ -41,4 +41,5 @@ maxdepth: 3
 queries
 aliases
 authentication
+inserting
 ```

docs/inserting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+# Inserting data
+
+The `dclient insert` command can be used to insert data from a local file directly into a Datasette instance, via the [Write API](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/json_api.html#the-json-write-api) introduced in the Datasette 1.0 alphas.
+
+First you'll need to {ref}`authenticate <authentication>` with the instance.
+
+To insert data from a `data.csv` file into a table called `my_table`, creating that table if it does not exist:
+
+```bash
+dclient insert https://my-private-space.datasette.cloud/data my_table data.csv --create
+```
+
+## Supported formats
+
+Data can be inserted from CSV, TSV, JSON or newline-delimited JSON files.
+
+The format of the file will be automatically detected. You can override this by using one of the following options:
+
+- `--csv`
+- `--tsv`
+- `--json`
+- `--nl` for newline-delimited JSON
+
+Use `--encoding <encoding>` to specify the encoding of the file. The default is `utf-8`.
+
+### JSON
+
+JSON files should be formatted like this:
+```json
+[
+    {
+        "id": 1
+        "column1": "value1",
+        "column2": "value2"
+    },
+    {
+        "id": 2
+        "column1": "value1",
+        "column2": "value2"
+    }
+]
+```
+Newline-delimited files like this:
+```
+{"id": 1, "column1": "value1", "column2": "value2"}
+{"id": 2, "column1": "value1", "column2": "value2"}
+```
+
+### CSV and TSV
+
+CSV and TSV files should have a header row containing the names of the columns.
+
+By default, `dclient` will attempt to detect the types of the different columns in the CSV and TSV files - so if a column only ever contains numeric integers it will be stored as integers in the SQLite database.
+
+You can disable this and have every value treated as a string using `--no-detect-types`.
+
+### Other options
+
+- `--create` - create the table if it doesn't already exist
+- `--replace` - replace any rows with a matching primary key
+- `--ignore` - ignore any rows with a matching existing primary key
+- `--pk id` - set a primary key (for if the table is being created)
+
+If you use `--create` a table will be created with rows to match the columns in your uploaded data - using the correctly detected types, unless you use `--no-detect-types` in which case every column will be of type `text`.