Madhurima Das wrote: > I am writing a C program to access a PostgreSQL database, where > I add a column if it doesn't exists in the table > or, update the column, if the column already exits. > Please suggest how to work with the conditional statements. > N.B. I wrote the following: > > res = PQexec(conn, "IF COL_LENGTH('protein_sequence','comment') IS NULL"); > PQclear(res); > if(res) > { > res = PQexec(conn, "ALTER TABLE protein_sequence ADD comment VARCHAR(500)"); > PQclear(res); > } > else > { > res = PQexec(conn, "UPDATE TABLE protein_sequence ADD comment VARCHAR(500)"); > PQclear(res); > } > > Is the code logically correct?? No, that doesn't make any sense. The statement sent with PQexec must be a legal SQL statement. You could do it like this: /* try the update */ res = PQexec(conn, "UPDATE protein_sequence SET comment = ... WHERE ..."); if (!res) { /* out of memory, error out */ } r = PQresultStatus(res); PQclear(res); if (r == PGRES_COMMAND_OK) { return; /* UPDATE ok */ } else if (r != PGRES_NONFATAL_ERROR) { /* unexpected result, error out */ } /* add the column */ res = PQexec(conn, "ALTER TABLE protein_sequence ADD comment VARCHAR(500)"); if (!res) { /* out of memory, error out */ } r = PQresultStatus(res); PQclear(res); if (r == PGRES_COMMAND_OK) { return; /* ALTER TABLE ok */ } else { /* unexpected result, error out */ } This code is untested. Yours, Laurenz Albe