Re: When does Postgres use binary I/O?

Paul A Jungwirth <pj(at)illuminatedcomputing(dot)com> writes:
> I've read the docs at [1] and also this interesting recent post about
> adding binary I/O to the hashtypes extension. I wrote send & recv
> functions for my new multirange types, but I'm not sure how to test
> them. After running installcheck or installcheck-world, the code
> coverage report says they aren't tested, nor are the send/recv
> functions for ranges or arrays. When does Postgres actually use these
> functions? Is there a good way to test them?

The core regression tests don't systematically exercise binary I/O,
and they certainly wouldn't magically cover a new type they didn't
use to. You'd need to add test case(s).

Likely it'd be good to have some more consistent approach to
testing that ... right now it's not even very obvious where
is a good place to add such tests. I do see a small test in
src/test/regress/input/misc.source (COPY BINARY stud_emp),
but that solution doesn't scale easily because of its
dependence on absolute file pathnames.

regards, tom lane