Re: wishlist for 8.4

Raphaël Jacquot wrote:
> I recently found myself trying to build a trigger to modify some fields
> in a good dozen similarly structured tables in which the similar columns
> had different names.
> in fact, I got stuck in pl/pgsql with the fact that there's no way to
> access the NEW tuple in an indirect way, having the name of the column
> in some variable. (I found that it could be done in plperl, but that
> left me with a taste of un-completeness...)

It's ugly, but you could play tricks with EXECUTE. Like:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION emp_stamp() RETURNS trigger AS $emp_stamp$
DECLARE
empname text;
BEGIN
EXECUTE 'SELECT ('''||new||'''::emp).empname' INTO empname;
RAISE NOTICE 'new empname is: %', empname;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$emp_stamp$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Not sure the quoting is right...

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com