Hello Jim
On 14/09/2015 19:23, Jim Nasby wrote:
On 9/14/15 8:59 AM, Charles Clavadetscher wrote:
Hello
In PostgreSQL it is possible to attach comments to almost everything.
This
made it possible for us to integrate the wiki that we use for our
technical
documentation directly with the database using the MediaWiki [1]
extensions
ExternalData [2] and MagicNoCache [3]. The result is a documentation on
tables and related objects (indexes, triggers, etc.) and views that
always
shows the current state, i.e. any DDL change or any comment attached
to an
object is shown in the wiki immediately (or on refresh if the change was
done after the reader landed on the page).
Neat! I hope you'll open source that. :)
Thank you for your answer. Sure I will put some information on it and
the source on my website soon and let you know. There is not really much
magic to it, but it can be quite helpful.
My next workaround is to simulate the behaviour of a COMMENT ON FUNCTION
PARAMETER/RETURNVALUE command inserting comments on these directly in
pg_description. For that I used a convention similar to the one used for
table attributes and defined following pg_description.objsubid:
-1 = return value
0 = comment on the function itself (this already exists)
1..n = comment on parameter at position n
At first glance, seems reasonable.
- Add function to get the position of the parameter, e.g.
LookupFuncNamePos(function_name, param_name) or a function to create the
whole ObjectAddress e.g. .
Something similar might exist already. TBH, to start with, I would only
support position number. You'll have to support that case anyway, and it
should be simpler.
I agree. Since parameter names are optional, supporting the position for
comments definition is mandatory and is probably simpler.
To long time PostgreSQL developers this may look straightforward. For the
moment I am not even sure if that is correct and if there are other
places
that would need additions, apart from the obvious display in psql.
I suspect that changes to support this should be pretty localized. I
suggest you look at other recent patches that have added COMMENT
functionality to see what they did.
Good idea. As a matter of fact, Àlvaro sent a sequence of commits that
relate in part to it. I will have a look to it as soon as I can.
BTW, I'm also interested in this but I'm not sure when I'd have time to
work on it.
Good to know, thank you. As I mention in my original post I should be
able to work on that in November this year. If I find some time I may
start things earlier. Let's keep in touch over this list. Before any
coding is done there should be an agreement on the syntax to be used in
the statement and the way the information is stored.
About the latter I think with the -1,0,1..n solution we are on a good
track. For what's concerning the syntax I suggest the following.
COMMENT ON FUNCTION function_name ( [ [ argmode ] [ argname ] argtype [,
...] ] ) PARAMETER param_position IS 'text';
COMMENT ON FUNCTION function_name ( [ [ argmode ] [ argname ] argtype [,
...] ] ) RETURN VALUE IS 'text';
An alternative to "RETURN VALUE" could be "RETURNS", which would make
the statement shorter, but I think this may be confusing.
The parameter list of the function is only required to identify the
function also in cases it exists with the same name in different
flavours. This sticks to the general syntax of the command and should be
easy to understand.
Your ideas?
Thanks
Charles
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