Many of my tables have a timestamp column, which I store as TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE. Often I only want to return the date from this field, and it may need a specific format. All of the queries are passed through PLpqsql functions that return either a record or a set of records. I find if I declare the date field in the return record as type DATE, then the conversion happens automatically, which is nice, but the format is whatever datestyle is set to, which isn't what I want. I can create the date field in the record as TEXT, then use to_char() to convert it, but I have to do that in every function. Ideally I could do something like CREATE TYPE return AS (..., mydate to_char(DATE, 'mm/dd/yy')); but that syntax doesn't work. I thought I might be able to create my own type, and have an implicit conversion of DATE, but I read http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/typeconv.html and found this line User-defined types are not related. Currently, PostgreSQL does not have information available to it on relationships between types, other than hardcoded heuristics for built-in types and implicit relationships based on available functions and casts. Is there another way to solve this? Thanks -karl PS Now when I type pgsql, I think "PigSqueal" Thanks a lot! {-;
