Inserting a needed record before a select

All,

Hello, I'm new to this list but I'm looking for some information.


What I need to do is to find a way to automallically insert a record if it
doesn'
t exist, prior to a SELECT.

Basically, I'm tracking some information based on date and the client
application when retrieving the information knows will that 'current' is
the record with today's date.

What I'd like is a way of of specifiying that when the SELECT is done,
there will be a check that a record exists for the current date and that if
it doesn't exist, a record will be inserted into the table for the current
date and then the SELECT will return the recors including the newly
inserted one.

What I've tried so far is a function that checks for the record, inserts it
if needed, and then returns a cursor that the client can use, but I was
wondering if there was something more direct.  I thought of a RULE but I
don't see that they can do processing that expressive.

Here's an example: mytable contains the date based stats information with
another id.  All the stats columns are defaulted so just inserting a new
record with the right id and date is sufficient.
=============

CREATE FUNCTION getdatestats (varchar) RETURNS refcursor AS '
DECLARE
    myid ALIAS FOR $1;
    today date;
    ref refcursor;
    dummyrow RECORD;

BEGIN

    ref := 'statscursor';
    SELECT INTO dummyrow * FROM mytable where id = AND statdate = today;
    IF NOT FOUND
        INSERT INTO  mytable (id, statdate) VALUES (myid, today)
    END IF;

    OPEN ref for SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id=myid;

    RETURN ref;
END;
' LANGUAGE PLPGSQL

=============


Any other ideas?  This works but I was wondering if it was possible to do
it without the client needing to do the transaction/cursor handling
(considering I'm only holding up to 30 days worth of data)

Thanks

Jay O'Connor