Re: Add header support to text format and matching feature

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 09:36:13AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 2022-06-07 Tu 11:47, Julien Rouhaud wrote:
> >
> > First, probably nitpicking, the HEADER MATCH is allowed for COPY TO, is that
> > expected? The documentation isn't really explicit about it, but there's
> > nothing to match when exporting data it's a bit surprising. I'm not opposed to
> > have HEADER MATCH means HEADER ON for COPY TO, as as-is one can easily reuse
> > the commands history, but maybe it should be clearly documented?
>
>
> I think it makes more sense to have a sanity check to prevent HEADER
> MATCH with COPY TO.

I'm fine with it. I added such a check and mentioned it in the documentation.

> > Then, apparently HEADER MATCH doesn't let you do sanity checks against a custom
> > column list. This one looks like a clear oversight, as something like that
> > should be entirely valid IMHO:
> >
> > CREATE TABLE tbl(col1 int, col2 int);
> > COPY tbl (col2, col1) TO '/path/to/file' WITH (HEADER MATCH);
> > COPY tbl (col2, col1) FROM '/path/to/file' WITH (HEADER MATCH);
> >
> > but right now it errors out with:
> >
> > ERROR: column name mismatch in header line field 1: got "col1", expected "col2"
> >
> > Note that the error message is bogus if you specify attributes in a
> > different order from the relation, as the code is mixing access to the tuple
> > desc and access to the raw fields with the same offset.
> > [...]
> I think it should, but a temporary alternative would be to forbid HEADER
> MATCH with explicit column lists until we can make it work right.

I think it would still be problematic if the target table has dropped columns.
Fortunately, as I initially thought the problem is only due to a thinko in the
original commit which used a wrong variable for the raw_fields offset. Once
fixed (attached v1) I didn't see any other problem in the rest of the logic and
all the added regression tests work as expected.