Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

On Monday 10 March 2003 10:51 am, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> * XML support? If we do anything, I'd want some extensible solution to
> allowing multiple query-result output formats from the backend, not an
> XML-specific hack. For one thing, that would allow the actual appearance
> of any XML support to happen later.

It seems this would also be a good solution to a previous discussion about
boolean representation.

The postgres output of t/f is perfectly resonable, but can be somewhat
confusing to someone that relies on PHP's typecasting. In the discussion,
someone mentioned that if you take in a variable directly from the database
and cast it to boolean, both 't' and 'f' will cast to true. It turned out to
be even more confusing because MySQL uses 0/1 which cast properly.

If I remember correctly, there was even talk of adding a run-time parameter
similar to the datestyle. If it were all handled in the query-result output
formatting functions like you suggest, that would seem like a much cleaner
solution.

Regards,
Jeff Davis