Improving ALTER TYPE support

John,

I've been working on a function which returns a setof a composite type.
Everytime I've changed the structure of the returning setof, I've had to
change the type accordingly, which current means doing a drop type ...
cascade down to the function. We should allow one of the following:

Why not go all the way and work out a way to define an SRF return type as a
part of the function? e.g.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION some_srf ( param1 int, param2 text )
RETURNS some_srf ( col1 int, col2 numeric ) AS ....

Then the "replace" function would automatically rebuild the type.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco

Makes more sense to do that, and I think it'll be cleaner to implement as
well.

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:

I've been working on a function which returns a setof a composite type.
Everytime I've changed the structure of the returning setof, I've had to
change the type accordingly, which current means doing a drop type ...
cascade down to the function. We should allow one of the following:

Why not go all the way and work out a way to define an SRF return type as a
part of the function? e.g.

Um, isn't that exactly what the OUT parameter support already gives you,
ie, an anonymous record type?

regards, tom lane

I guess I don't understand what one has to do with the other (SRF's
returning records and OUT parameters). I always thought they were exclusive,
could you elaborate?

"John Jawed" <johnjawed@gmail.com> writes:

I guess I don't understand what one has to do with the other (SRF's
returning records and OUT parameters). I always thought they were exclusive,
could you elaborate?

(BTW, please don't post uselessly HTML-ified mail.)

If you write something like

create function foo (in p1 int, out r1 int, out r2 text)
returns setof record

then you've effectively got a function returning an anonymous composite
type (here, with one int and one text column). I don't see a case for
inventing a separate facility that will pretty much just duplicate this
functionality.

regards, tom lane

Tom,

If you write something like

        create function foo (in p1 int, out r1 int, out r2 text)
        returns setof record

D'oh! I feel like a dork now. I forgot we had this.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco

Ok, this way works and the proposed way isn't necessary.