Re: HELP: what's wrong with my PL/PSQL function??

Bruno Boettcher wrote:
> 
> and i get an error:
> ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near "$1"
> (BTW would be helpful if the thing could spit out also the line
> number....)

You can get syntax error line-numbers by editing the function in a
text-file and \i file to import it. Otherwise, plpgsql's error reporting
is a bit weak.

> isolated the prob to this line:
> FOR arow IN SELECT * FROM "jrlname" WHERE plus=sumup LOOP
> in fact it doesn't seem to like the fact that i use a dynamic table
> name??
> i remind vaguely that pl/psql had indeed this sort of problem... but
> this was years ago.... is there any workaround? even using perl?

Still there - plpgsql script is pre-compiled so there's no easy way
around it. There is a new EXECUTE command available which takes a string
and runs it as a query, but I don't think it'll help you here (could be
wrong, check the archives there was a discussion about a similar problem
some time ago IIRC).

> The whole prog is a bookkeeping program... and i want it now really able
> to work with several sets of tables.... without duplicating also the
> functions i wrote associated to the tables....

You could use the EXECUTE system to generate one function for each
table. See the auto-timestamp generator in Roberto Mello's plpgsql
cookbook at http://techdocs.postgresql.org/ for an example.

Otherwise tcl/perl scripting should help you since these aren't
pre-compiled. Can't comment further since I don't use them.

HTH

- Richard Huxton