Re: IF...THEN...ELSE on INSERT

On Sat, 2001-12-08 at 02:13, Vincent AE Scott wrote:
>
> Thanks for that, and yes it does help somewhat, but it appears somewhat
> cumbersome to me. It appears to me ( but i could be well out of whack )
> that the function is losely linked to the table. If i change the table
> definition ( like adding an extra column ) do i have to modify the
> function aswell?
>
> Is there anyway i can just modify the behaviour of an insert statement
> to transparently do this for me. That way at least the database clients
> dont have to implicitly know about this function/feature. Does that
> make sense?

Yep, that does make sense. What you are asking for is effectively an
'INSERT OR UPDATE <table> (<field list> ) VALUES( <value list> ) ...'
syntax.

This is being looked at in some areas ("CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION",
"CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW", ...) for 7.3, I believe. Whether or not there
will be an "INSERT OR UPDATE ..." statement included in there I am not
sure. I am pretty sure it has been proposed, and I know it would make
things easier for many programmers, myself included :-)

I think that it might be possible to write a function to do what you
want generically in 7.1 or later, but it would be complex. PL/PGSQL
will let you PERFORM a query you have constructed as a string, and you
can pass a row to a function, so you could (perhaps) do something very
complicated and unmaintainable there.

You might be better with a more complex language like PL/Perl for
something along those lines, or with a C function.

Regards,
Andrew.
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