Re: unfriendly error when accessing NEW in statement-level trigger

=?UTF-8?B?SmFuIFVyYmHFhHNraQ==?= <wulczer(at)wulczer(dot)org> writes:
> When you try to use the NEW variable in a statement-level trigger, you get
> ERROR: record "new" is not assigned yet
> DETAIL: The tuple structure of a not-yet-assigned record is indeterminate.

> I'm not that familiar with PL/pgSQL code, so I'm not sure how or if this
> should be fixed. From a quick look it seems that the NEW and OLD
> variables could be defined as row variables instead of record, since the
> format of the tuple is known.

Yeah, maybe. I suspect that that wouldn't have worked when the code was
first designed, but now that we create a separate execution context for
each trigger target table, it should be the case that NEW/OLD have
stable structure. You'd need to watch out for ALTER TABLE commands
though --- I don't remember exactly what plpgql does about rowtypes
changing underneath it.

regards, tom lane