Re: [GENERAL] How to ensure that a stored function always returns TRUE or FALSE?

[Alexander Farber]

Thank you all for the valuable replies.

I've also got suggestions to use IS NOT DISTINCT FROM or STRICT at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35742865/how-to-ensure-that-a-stored-function-always-returns-true-or-false


but the former has the edge case of NULL=NULL returning TRUE
and with the latter I would have to be careful with the way I call my
function -
and I am worried I might forget it later and this is a security related...

So I will probably use this function:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION check_user(in_social integer,
        in_sid varchar(255),
        in_auth varchar(32))
        RETURNS boolean AS
$func$
        SELECT CASE
                WHEN in_social IS NULL THEN FALSE
                WHEN in_sid    IS NULL THEN FALSE
                WHEN in_auth   IS NULL THEN FALSE
                ELSE (MD5('secret word' || in_social || in_sid) = in_auth)
        END;

$func$ LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE;

Regards
Alex