9.7. Table Functions

Hello,

I hope I am posting this to the approprate list. I am somewhat new to postgres, and have been extensively reading the documentation over the last few days. As a whole, it is very helpful and informative. Great work!

Today I came across the following issue with table functions:

I'm trying to write a table function that returns a recordset. I'm running postgres 7.3.3 on redhat Following postgres Documentation Chapter 9.7, I used the following commands to test this:

CREATE TABLE foo (fooid int, foosubid int, fooname text);

CREATE FUNCTION getfoo(int) RETURNS setof foo AS '
SELECT * FROM foo WHERE fooid = $1;
' LANGUAGE SQL;

SELECT * FROM getfoo(1) AS t1;

Unfortunately, the command:

SELECT * FROM getfoo(1) AS t1;

returns a:

server parse error at or near "("

Is there something I'm missing here? As a workaround I tried:

SELECT getfoo(1) AS t1;

This command ran, but returned a row t1 with a series of numbers in it, rather than a recordset of columns and values as the documentation suggests when it says:

"If the function returns a composite type, the result columns get the same names as the individual attributes of the type."

Thank you very much for your help, and please let me know if I can be of any assistance in trouble shooting this issue/ updating the documentation on this issue.

Elisha