Cannot declare record members NOT NULL

From: Cultural Sublimation <cultural_sublimation(at)yahoo(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Cannot declare record members NOT NULL
Date: 2007-09-12 19:32:13
Message-ID: 540511.75258.qm@web63405.mail.re1.yahoo.com
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Hi,

I am not sure if this qualifies as a bug report or a feature request,
but I don't see any way to tell Postgresql that the members of a record
cannot be NULL. This causes all kinds of problems when this record
is used to declare the return type of a function. Suppose I had the
following table: (note that all columns are NOT NULL)

CREATE TABLE movies
(
movie_id int4 UNIQUE NOT NULL,
movie_name text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (movie_id)
);

Suppose also that I didn't want the clients to query the table directly,
but instead they have to go through a function "get_movies" which returned
a record of type "get_movies_t":

CREATE TYPE get_movies_t AS
(
movie_id int4,
movie_name text
);

CREATE FUNCTION get_movies ()
RETURNS SETOF get_movies_t
LANGUAGE sql STABLE
AS
$$
SELECT movie_id, movie_name FROM movies;
$$;

The problem is that Postgresql tells the client that the function returns
two columns, both of which can be NULL, and this makes a mess on the
client side. Is there anyway I can tell Postgresql that the columns of
get_movies_t are NOT NULL?

If this is (yet another) defect in the SQL standard, can someone suggest
an alternative that would get around it?

Thanks for the help!
C.S.

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