Re: COPY FROM - how to identify results?

Brian, that's not what I meant.
Parsing of the uploaded file is just for the purpose of extracting the
components of each spreadsheet row and constructing the INSERTs.
Actually, whenever I copy from a file, either using COPY or with a
custom importer, I put the data into a staging table, so that I can
pre-process before writing to the main table. But why would COPYing from
a file be so insecure?

nextval() and sequences are not what I'm looking for. I want to assign
the same id to all the rows imported from the same file. Let's say user
A is working on portfolio_id 3, and decides to upload a spreadsheet with
new values. I want to be able to import the spreadsheet into the staging
table, and assign a portfolio_id of 3 to all its entries.
Of course, I can't just UPDATE the staging table to have portfolio_id =
3, because user B might also be uploading a sheet for portfolio_id = 9.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks
Jaime

brian wrote:
> Jaime Silvela wrote:
>> I've written a web application where users can upload spreadsheets,
>> instead of having to key in forms. The spreadsheets get parsed and
>> INSERTED into a table, and with the INSERT gets added an identifier
>> so that I can always trace back what a particular row in the table
>> corresponds to.
>> I'd like to use COPY - FROM to achieve the same thing, but a stopping
>> point is that I don't see how to add the new spreadsheet with a
>> particular identifier.
>>
>> I'd like to be able to do something like
>> COPY mytable (field-1, .. field-n, id = my_id) FROM file; or
>> COPY mytable FROM file WITH id = my_id;
>>
>> A very messy solution would be to create a temp table with a special
>> name, COPY to it, then INSERT from it to the permanent table.
>> However, I don't want a solution of that type.
>>
>
> I may have completely misunderstood you, but i'd think that copying
> the data directly from an uploaded file would be more than a little
> insecure. But then, you also mentioned that you parse the uploaded
> file. I don't understand how these two statements can be compatible.
>
> Do you mean that you'd like to load the data into a table, then
> retrieve the sequence ID? Presumably, if your application is really
> parsing the data first, one could simply do an INSERT and then grab
> the last inserted ID. Look at nextval() & currval().
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/functions-sequence.html
>
> brian
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
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>

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