Three searches LIKE against cast(json_col AS text), which means they have to match
bytes a JSON encoder wrote. Encoders disagree on non-ASCII: stdlib escapes it to
\uXXXX, orjson writes it raw. Which one produced a row depends on the codec in force
when it was written, so any single pattern finds only half the table.
models.py hard-codes the stdlib spelling, with a comment asserting SQLite stores
JSON via json.dumps(ensure_ascii=True). Model.meta is a JSONField, which has
serialised through JSONCodec since ENABLE_ORJSON was introduced, so on that setting
it stores raw UTF-8 and the escaped pattern matches nothing: non-ASCII workspace
model tag search is broken today. prompts.py and automations.py hard-code the
opposite spelling and miss rows written the other way.
json_text_variants returns both spellings a string can take inside serialised JSON,
collapsing to one for ASCII, and the three call sites OR over them. Rows written
under either setting are now found under either setting, which also covers a
database holding a mix of the two.
Case handling is unchanged. models.py keeps matching non-ASCII tags case-sensitively
on SQLite, whose LOWER() is ASCII-only and would not fold the stored text the way
str.lower() folds the tag. ASCII tags collapse to a single variant and take exactly
the query they took before.
Verified on SQLite across every combination of codec-that-wrote-the-row and
codec-the-app-is-running, for an ASCII and a CJK tag, over all three call sites: 24
of 24 match, against 12 of 24 before. Quoting still bounds whole-tag matches, so
searching "weather" does not match a row tagged "weathervane".
Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both session factories run with expire_on_commit=False, so ORM objects keep their attribute values after commit. Every session.refresh issued right after a commit therefore re-SELECTed a row whose values the session already held, including full chat JSON blobs and user settings, purely to overwrite identical data. Fifty such calls existed across the model layer, covering nearly every write path in the app (chat inserts, title updates, pin/archive toggles, user role and settings updates, tool, prompt, function, model, file, tag, feedback, memory, automation and grant writes).
All fifty are removed. The only refreshes with an actual job were the two update-then-reload paths in tools and skills, where a Core UPDATE statement bypasses the identity map; those now use session.get(..., populate_existing=True), which guarantees a fresh row in one SELECT whether or not the row was already present in the session (the previous code issued get plus refresh, two SELECTs, on the default configuration).
Benchmark (real SQLite DB, per write):
| write path | before | after |
| --- | --- | --- |
| chat title update, ~600 KB chat blob | 2.08 ms | 1.24 ms |
| user role update, small row | 1.21 ms | 0.68 ms |
On Postgres each removed refresh is additionally a network round trip. The chat-blob case also skips re-parsing the entire JSON document per write.
Functionally verified against a fresh database: user insert, role and settings updates, chat insert (including the server-default meta column, which is always provided client-side), title update and pin toggle, tool insert and the Core-update reload path, tag insert and the prompt insert flow that pins version_id after history creation all return correct values and persist correctly.
Classic298