Backtick v/s double-quotes in table records?
Hi everyone! I’m trying to export some records from a Convex entry for testing/debugging purposes, and I’ve run into a formatting issue that I need some clarity on. Here’s what’s happening:
- I used the right-click "Copy" option to get the data to my clipboard, intending to paste it into my IDE for inspection.
- I expected the data to be JSON, but it seems there’s a difference: some text fields (generated using text interpolation at creation time) are stored in a backtick-encapsulated format rather than double quotes.
While this looks nice in the Convex dashboard, it’s causing issues for me in the IDE. I have a few questions:
- What is the difference between backtick-encapsulated text and double-quoted text in Convex records?
- Can I assume that records stored in Convex tables are JSON values if they were created as javascript objects?
- The tables currently don’t have schemas. If I decide to adopt a schema later (ensuring it’s compliant with existing data), will it affect how the existing records are read? For example, if I assign a string type to these values, will they automatically convert to double-quoted text in the records?
Thanks in advance for any guidance!
1 Reply
In the Convex db, strings are just unicode strings. when stored, they're encoded the same way as JSON encodes them, but that's not really important (it's not visible to your app).
The backtick-vs-doublequote thing you're observing is a dashboard feature for displaying strings with special characters (like newlines).
Your questions:
- there's no difference in the convex records
- convex stores JSON values and a few other datatypes https://docs.convex.dev/database/types (but backtick-string isn't different from other strings)
- schemas validate your data, so code will throw errors if you store the wrong data type, but the schema doesn't change the stored data. They might change how the dashboard displays it, because they help the dashboard guess how you want to view it.
Data Types | Convex Developer Hub
All Convex documents are defined as Javascript objects. These objects can have