Hey thanks for your email, this was exactly the explanation I was
looking for. I figured out the CREATE TYPE technique but I'm gonna
give the out parameters a try as well, it kinda looks cleaner
especially if the
only thing that uses the type is a single stored proc.. Albe Laurenz wrote: Mike Christensen wrote:I have the following function: CREATE FUNCTION foo(_userid uuid) RETURNS SETOF record AS $BODY$ BEGIN RETURN QUERY select n.UserId, u.Alias, n.Date, n.Data --Bunch of joins, etc If I understand correctly, I have to return "SETOF record" since my result set doesn't match a table and isn't a single value. However, this means when I want to call it I have to provide a column definition list, such as: select * from foo as (...); Is there any way to specify this column list within the function itself? The problem I'm running into is I want to call this function using Npgsql which doesn't appear to support passing in a column definition list.You can avoid that problem if you specify the return type in the function definition. There are two possibilities: The "classical" way is to define a TYPE similar to this: CREATE TYPE foo_type AS ( _userid uuid, _alias text, _date date, _data text ); or similar, depending on your select list and data types. Then you can define the function as: CREATE FUNCTION foo(_userid uuid) RETURNS SETOF foo_type ... The "new" way is to use output parameters. This is a little harder to understand, but you need not define a foo_type: CREATE FUNCTION foo(INOUT _userid uuid, OUT _alias text, OUT _date date, OUT _data text) RETURNS SETOF RECORD ... In both cases you can call the function like this: SELECT * FROM foo('A0EEBC99-9C0B-4EF8-BB6D-6BB9BD380A11'); The OUT parameters are just a different way of specifying the output type. Yours, Laurenz Albe |