Re: Calling function from VFP changes character field to Memo

On 15/11/2022 2:44 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> Frank Cazabon <frank(dot)cazabon(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> If however I have a function defined like this
>> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.testfunction(
>>     )
>>     RETURNS TABLE
>>     (
>>         Firstname character(30)
>>     )
>>     LANGUAGE 'plpgsql'
>> AS $BODY$
>> BEGIN
>>     RETURN QUERY SELECT p.cFirstName FROM patients p;
>> END;
>> $BODY$;
>> And I call:
>> SELECT * FROM public.testFunction();
>> Then FirstName returns as a Memo field (similar to a Text field).
> This is mostly about whatever software stack you're using on the
> client side --- Memo is certainly not something Postgres knows about.
>
>> Any idea what I need to do to get it to return the character(30) type?
> There's no chance of getting back the "30" part with this structure,
> because function signatures do not carry length restrictions.
> What I expect is happening is that you get firstname as an
> unspecified-length "character" type, and something on the client
> side is deciding to cope with that by calling it "Memo" instead.
>
> You could perhaps work around that by defining a named composite
> type:
>
> create type testfunction_result as (firstname character(30), ...);
>
> create function testfunction() returns setof testfunction_result as ...
>
> regards, tom lane
Thanks, so I could define the function like this - removed the (30):

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.testfunction(
     )
     RETURNS TABLE
     (
         Firstname character
     )
     LANGUAGE 'plpgsql'

I'll try the type definition and see if that helps.