Re: CREATE TABLE from inside a function...

Actually there are two problems here, one IIRC you cannot use commands
like CREATE TABLE (etc) from PL/PGSQL (You'll get a cannot copy
node)  Two, PL/PGSQL wouldn't probably support substituting a variable
for the table name anyway (since it also doesn't work for select *
from <variable>).

You might be able to do this in pl/tcl, but I'm not sure since I don't
know tcl.

Stephan Szabo
sszabo@bigpanda.com

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Dominic J. Eidson wrote:

>
> Is there a specific reason why one can not do a CREATE TABLE from inside a
> pl/pgsql function? I've been trying to get some triggers working, and they
> all keep erroring with the same error...
>
> The following schema:
> CREATE TABLE "spares_dbs" (
>         "dbs_id" serial,
>         "dbs_name" character varying(20),
>         "dbs_desc" text
> );
>
> And the following trigger:
>
> CREATE FUNCTION spares_trig_insert_dbs() RETURNS opaque AS '
> BEGIN
>   IF NEW.dbs_name ISNULL THEN
>     RAISE EXCEPTION ''% cannot be NULL'', NEW.dbs_name;
>   END IF;
>
>   CREATE TABLE NEW.dbs_name ( id int, oem text, price float );
>   RETURN NEW;
> END;
> ' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';
>
> CREATE TRIGGER spares_test BEFORE INSERT ON spares_dbs FOR EACH ROW
> EXECUTE PROCEDURE spares_trig_insert_dbs();
>
> spares=# INSERT INTO spares_dbs VALUES ( NULL, 'test', 'Test table' );
> ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near "$1"
>
> Looking at the postmaster log (-d 6), reveals the following:
>
> StartTransactionCommand
> query: INSERT INTO spares_dbs VALUES ( NULL, 'test', 'Test table' );
> parser outputs:
>
> ... snip parser output ...
>
> ProcessQuery
> query: SELECT   $1  ISNULL
> parser outputs:
>
> ... snip more parser output ...
>
> query: CREATE TABLE  $1  ( id int, oem text, price float )
> ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near "$1"
> DEBUG:  Last error occured while executing PL/pgSQL function
> spares_trig_insert_dbs
> DEBUG:  line 5 at SQL statement
> AbortCurrentTransaction
>
> My understand was it should have replaced "NEW.dbs_name" with "test"
> (according to the INSERT data)...