From: Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>
Message-Id: <199804240405.AAA25030@candle.pha.pa.us>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Re: [INTERFACES] retrieving varchar size
To: byronn@insightdist.com (Byron Nikolaidis)
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 00:05:30 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: hannu@trust.ee, daveh@insightdist.com, pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org,
	pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
In-Reply-To: <353FFC77.55A58CF5@insightdist.com> from "Byron Nikolaidis" at
	Apr 23, 98 10:44:07 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> 
> 
> 
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
> > > 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?
> 
> Yes, that would do it!
> 
> Thank you for listening to our ravings on this issue.

Added to TODO:

	* Add pg_attribute.atttypmod/Resdom->restypmod to PGresult structure

This is a good suggestion.

-- 
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