Re: table name as function argument?

Les,

On Feb 5, 2005, at 9:21 PM, Les Carter wrote:

> Hi, I'm fairly new to postgres and was wondering how would I go about
> using an argument passed into a user function to refer to a table.
>
> As an example, consider the code below where I want to see if a table
> has any rows in it (this isn't what I'm trying to achieve but just the
> easiest thing I could think of to demonstrate what my problem is).

You need to use EXECUTE for cases where the table references cannot be
resolved when the function is created. See:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/plpgsql-
statements.html#PLPGSQL-STATEMENTS-EXECUTING-DYN

Note that EXECUTE can't return results, but this section points you to
the relevant solutions.

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL