Autocomplete column names with remote `tbl`s

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
r, sqlite
Domain
databases, tooling

Research direction

No source file or test is named. Reproduce the R example with local mtcars and the remote SQLite table, then trace the Positron autocomplete entry point for dplyr expressions. Done means column-name completion appears for remote tbl objects as it does for local data frames, with coverage for the reported example.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement lang: r support

One thing I miss from RStudio is column names autocompleting from remote tables, specifically when using dplyr verbs. Is this a known issue?

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.06.0 (Universal) build 167
Code - OSS Version: 1.100.0
Commit: e7e5d5590adc6bf7b760f837051cd2f57ea9e3dc
Date: 2025-05-29T20:44:08.369Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Interpreter details:

R 4.3.2
dbplyr 2.5.0
dplyr 1.1.4

Describe the issue:

I miss column names auto completing when interacting with a remote table.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

Setup

# Load required libraries
library(dplyr)
library(dbplyr)
library(DBI)
library(RSQLite)


# Create an in-memory SQLite database and copy mtcars to it
con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), ":memory:")
dbWriteTable(con, "mtcars", mtcars)

# Create a remote table connection (may not have autocompletion in Positron)
remote_mtcars <- tbl(con, "mtcars")

Trying to select a column:

remote_mtcars |> select(gear)   # no autocomplete option

Expected or desired behavior:

would like it to behave as:

mtcars |> select(gear)

I mean to upload screenshots, but for some reason our firewall is blocking that :/

Thanks!

Dominant language
TypeScript
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Forks
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Merged PRs (30d)
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