PostgreSQL 8.2.23 Documentation | ||||
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LISTEN registers the current session as a listener on the notification condition name. If the current session is already registered as a listener for this notification condition, nothing is done.
Whenever the command NOTIFY name is invoked, either by this session or another one connected to the same database, all the sessions currently listening on that notification condition are notified, and each will in turn notify its connected client application. See the discussion of NOTIFY for more information.
A session can be unregistered for a given notify condition with the UNLISTEN command. A session's listen registrations are automatically cleared when the session ends.
The method a client application must use to detect
notification events depends on which PostgreSQL application programming interface
it uses. With the libpq library,
the application issues LISTEN as an
ordinary SQL command, and then must periodically call the
function PQnotifies
to find out
whether any notification events have been received. Other
interfaces such as libpgtcl
provide higher-level methods for handling notify events; indeed,
with libpgtcl the application
programmer should not even issue LISTEN
or UNLISTEN directly. See the
documentation for the interface you are using for more
details.
NOTIFY contains a more extensive discussion of the use of LISTEN and NOTIFY.