Shortcuts and Spotlight

Table of contents

Overview
The actions
Spotlight
Handing the app back to a workspace
See also

Overview

Pharos publishes App Intents, so its connections, saved Sessions and tables are available to the Shortcuts app, to Siri and to Spotlight. Your saved Sessions are also indexed, so you can find one by name from Spotlight and open it straight into a query tab.

Nothing has to be turned on. The actions appear in Shortcuts the first time you run Pharos, and the saved Sessions are indexed at launch and again whenever you add, rename or delete one.

The actions

Search for “Pharos” in the Shortcuts app’s action list.

Action	What it does
Open Connection	Opens a query tab bound to a saved connection, and connects it.
Run Saved Session	Opens a saved Session in a tab without its saved results, runs its cards in order, and returns the last card’s rows as a CSV file.
New Query Tab	Opens a query tab holding the SQL you supply. The query is not run.
Open Saved Session	Opens a saved Session in a tab, with the results saved with it. Nothing is run.
Export Table	Opens Pharos’s export panel for a table, ready for you to choose the format, the columns and the destination.

Every action brings Pharos to the front — the work happens in the app, with the same connections, tabs and confirmations you get when you do it by hand. An action that opens a tab uses the current tab when that tab is untouched, and a new tab beside it otherwise (see Where opened items go).

Siri phrases

Two actions have spoken phrases:

“Open Pharos connection”, “Connect to <connection> in Pharos”
“Run a saved Session in Pharos”, “Run <saved Session> in Pharos”

Run Saved Session

The action opens the saved Session in a tab, without its saved results, and then runs all of its cards, in order, through the editor’s own Run All Cards command. The CSV file holds the rows of the last card. If a card fails, Run All stops there and the action reports that no result arrived. That matters: your query variables are substituted exactly as they are in the editor, and the destructive-SQL confirmation still appears.

A saved Session holding DELETE, DROP, TRUNCATE or UPDATE stops at the confirmation sheet, and the shortcut waits for you to answer it. Nothing destructive runs unattended.

The action returns a CSV file of the rows that were loaded, named after the query, and reports the row count in its dialog. The CSV uses the same escaping as Copy as CSV in the results grid, so the two produce identical text. It does not page through the whole table: what you get is what the grid loaded.

The saved Session’s connection is used when the tab has none. A saved Session with no connection at all cannot be run, and the action says so.

Export Table

This action gets the export panel ready; it never writes a file on its own. Choose the format, the columns and the destination in the panel as usual.

Spotlight

Press ⌘Space and type the name of a saved Session. Pharos’s saved Sessions appear with their folder as a keyword and the first line of their SQL as the description. Opening a result brings Pharos forward with the Session in a tab, with its saved results. Nothing is run.

Spotlight indexes the saved Sessions of the copy of Pharos you are running. A second, separately identified copy keeps its own index.

Handing the app back to a workspace

While a query tab is bound to a workspace (that is, after its first query has run), Pharos donates it as a user activity. The activity is searchable, so a workspace can be reopened from outside the app; it is deliberately not offered over Handoff, because a workspace names a local connection and a local history record that mean nothing on another Mac.