Accessing fields in a function that returns a set of composite type - How? - Mailing list pgsql-novice

Hello everyone,


I am using tsearch2 to create a search engine for our website. I am
using the tsearch2 guide as my reference and am adapting it to fit our
requirements:

http://www.rhodesmill.org/brandon/projects/tsearch2-guide.html

I have a composite type for search_result. This is the definition:

Composite type "public.search_result"
    Column     |  Type
---------------+---------
 article_id    | integer
 article_title | text
 headline      | text
 rank          | real


I then have a pl/pgsql function that returns a set of "search_result"

CREATE FUNCTION search(text) RETURNS SETOF search_result LANGUAGE sql $$
SELECT article_id, article_title, headline(article_text, q),
rank(article_vector, q)
FROM articles, to_tsquery($1) AS q
WHERE article_vector @@ q ORDER BY rank(article_vector, q) DESC;

To do a full-text search, I only need to do this:

SELECT search('string');

However, running the function gives me a recordset with only one
column ("search"). I'd like to be able to access the fields of the
composite type (search_result) that is returned by the function -
article_id, article_title, headline, and rank. I haven't figured out
how to do this but it's necessary because I want to be able to control
the formatting of the output.

Thanks and best regards,
Matt

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