Hey there everyone,
I am going through the process of writing my first pgtap tests for my database, and I wanted to get some feedback on if my solution seems fine, is just dumb, or could be acomplished much easier another way.
So my main problem I was trying to work around, was my tests are written in functions and called using runtests(), so using psql and \copy to save test data to the filesystem isn't really part of the workflow, but I still needed a way to have my "expected" query resultset passed into results_eq [
https://pgtap.org/documentation.html#results_eq] easily within a function body.
I originally manually dumped some "known good" data from a query to csv, and built some SELECT ... FROM VALUES (...) statements by hand to do this. That obviously sucks.
Then I started looking to see if there was a way to get Postgres to "serialize" a query resultset to a values list similar to how pg_dump is able to be configured to dump data as inserts for the plain format. I couldn't find anything at all though. No mention of anything similar on the mailing list, stackoverflow, etc... I feel like I must be searching incorrectly.
Anyways, since I didn't find anything, or any discussion online for something like I wanted, I just tried building it, see attached for source.
It's a function that takes in the text of a query that produces a resultset, and returns a SELECT ... FROM VALUES (...) statement that will produce the exact same output.
It does so by running that query and creating a temporary table with the results, then we query the system catalogs to get the data types, and column names of the temporary table produced by the query, and then uses that information to build a VALUES from clause that contains each row by scanning the temp table, and also dynamically builds the SELECT ... columns list to cast everything to the correct data type, we then put all of that together and return the query text to the caller.
Not fully tested or anything, and not guaranteed to work well. Please, if you see any issues let me know. I got this together in an hour of hacking... but it did solve my immediate problem and I have been able to generate easy "expected" result sets for my tests.
So I really just wanted to see if there is a better way to go about what i'm trying to do, does Postgres already support something similar I can harness instead of this hack? Or is this really an alright way to go?
