Matthew Wakeling wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, justin wrote:

What would be the syntax for putting a single row from a cursor into a variable? I have tried:

FETCH INTO left left_cursor;

which says syntax error, and

left = FETCH left_cursor;

which gives the error 'ERROR: missing datatype declaration at or near "="'

Have to declare Left variable as record data type declaration part of the function

It is.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION overlap_gene_primer() RETURNS SETOF RECORD AS $$
DECLARE
    left location;
    retval RECORD;
BEGIN
    DECLARE left_cursor NO SCROLL CURSOR FOR SELECT location FROM location, gene WHERE location.id = gene.id ORDER BY objectid, start, end;
    left = FETCH left_cursor;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Matthew

Change the type to Record
from the help file
FETCH retrieves the next row from the cursor into a target, which might be a row variable, a record variable, or a comma-separated list of simple variables, just like SELECT INTO. If there is no next row, the target is set to NULL(s). As with SELECT INTO, the special variable FOUND can be checked to see whether a row was obtained or not