From: Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>
Message-Id: <199804240137.VAA09828@candle.pha.pa.us>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Re: [INTERFACES] retrieving varchar size
To: byronn@insightdist.com (Byron Nikolaidis)
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 21:37:33 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: hannu@trust.ee, daveh@insightdist.com, pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org,
	pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
In-Reply-To: <353FDE5F.30748CC1@insightdist.com> from "Byron Nikolaidis" at
	Apr 23, 98 08:35:43 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> The problem with that theory is this.  If the frontend application just
> executes some random query, such as "select * from table", you really do not
> know anything about what is coming back. You must rely on the little bit of
> information the protocol gives you.  In the case of Postgres, it gives you
> the fieldname, datatype, and size for each column in the result.
> Unfortunately, for varchar and char(n), the size reports -1.  This is not
> very helpful for describing the result set.
> 
> Your above example works fine (in fact we use that already) when you know the
> table and column name, as in metadata functions such as SQLColumns() in the
> ODBC driver.

Yep.  We could pass back atttypmod as part of the PGresult.  I can add
that to the TODO list.  Would that help?

-- 
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