Message-Id: <353FFC77.55A58CF5@insightdist.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 22:44:07 -0400
From: Byron Nikolaidis <byronn@insightdist.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
To: Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: hannu@trust.ee, daveh@insightdist.com, pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org,
	pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Re: [INTERFACES] retrieving varchar size
References: <199804240137.VAA09828@candle.pha.pa.us>
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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.

Byron