Project name: Add table function support to PL/Tcl (Todo item)
What the patch does:
This patch adds table function support (returning record and SETOF record)
to PL/Tcl. This patch also updates PL/Tcl to use the Tcl object-style
interface instead of the older string-style one, increasing performance.
Status of the patch:
The code seems to work well, but this is its first submission.
Branch the patch is against: HEAD
Compiles and tests successfully on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Have not tested
it with other systems but there is nothing platform specific about it.
Regression tests: Passes all existing tests but there aren't many for PL/Tcl.
This change removes PL/Tcl backward compatibility to Tcl version 7.
Since Tcl 8 has been in production release since 1997, I felt
that 13 years was long enough and PL/Tcl users linking with Tcl 7 should
go ahead and upgrade. This also allowed removal of the Tcl 7 compatibility
shims.
More importantly, this patch extends PL/Tcl to support returning rows and
sets of rows. While I studied all of the other PL languages (PL/PgSql,
PL/Perl, PL/Python and PL/C) while developing this patch, it hews most
closely to to approach taken by PL/PgSQL.
All existing semantics for functions and triggers have been retained, requiring
no changes to existing PL/Tcl code.
PL/Tcl coders who want to create functions returning a record will use "return"
to return results, the same as for a scalar, except that the value returned
should be a list of key-value pairs ("array get" format) where the keys are
`the field names and the values are the corresponding values.
To return sets of rows, one needs to use the new PL/Tcl function "return_next".
Return_next also accepts a list of key-value pairs, as "return" does.
Typically this will be invoked as something like
return_next [array get row]
To return multiple rows, the function should invoke return_next
multiple times (once for each row returned). As mentioned, the C
implementation works like PL/PgSQL, so PL/Tcl saves up the tuples in a
tuple store and then uses the SFRM_Materialize return mode to send the
results back. Fields are converted to Datum during the call to return_next,
so if any field names are in the list that aren't in the row or there are
data conversion errors, they will be returned as a Tcl error to the caller of
return_next and can be caught using Tcl's "catch", etc.
