Re: Polymorphic "setof record" function?

Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On 1/13/09, Christian Schröder <cs(at)deriva(dot)de> wrote:
>
>> Hi list,
>> I have written a function that returns a setof record. The function has a
>> table name as a parameter and the resulting records have the same structure
>> as this table. Is there any easy way to specify this when I call the
>> function? If the table has many columns then it's annoying to specify all of
>> them.
>> I need something like:
>> select * from myfunc('mytable') as x(like mytable)
>> or
>> select * from myfunc('mytable') as x(mytable%TYPE)
>>
>> Is there any solution for PostgreSQL 8.2?
>>
>
> Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge there is no way to do this.
> I think what you want is to have sql functions that specialize on
> type in the way that templates do in C++.
>
That would certainly be the best solution, but I would also be happy
with some syntactic sugar: The function may still be declared as
returning a set of records, so that I would still have to declare their
actual return type in the query. However, I would like to have an easy
way to express: "the record will have the same structure as table x".

Regards,
Christian

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