Thread: View user defined functions

How can I see the definition of a user defined function without
dumping the database or the schema to a file?  I've been looking for
a way to do this for about three weeks now, off and on and it's
getting rather tedious to need to dump the schema every time I wish
to change some part of a function.

Charley

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 09:43:51AM -0500, Charley L. Tiggs wrote:
> How can I see the definition of a user defined function without
> dumping the database or the schema to a file?  I've been looking for
> a way to do this for about three weeks now, off and on and it's
> getting rather tedious to need to dump the schema every time I wish
> to change some part of a function.

In psql you can use "\df+ functionname"; you could also issue a
query like

SELECT prosrc FROM pg_proc WHERE proname = 'functionname';

Note that neither of these methods returns the complete CREATE
FUNCTION statement that you might be looking for.

Some people maintain the source for their functions outside the
database so they can do "edit-load" instead of "dump-edit-load."

--
Michael Fuhr

Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org> writes:
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 09:43:51AM -0500, Charley L. Tiggs wrote:
>> How can I see the definition of a user defined function without
>> dumping the database or the schema to a file?  I've been looking for
>> a way to do this for about three weeks now, off and on and it's
>> getting rather tedious to need to dump the schema every time I wish
>> to change some part of a function.

> In psql you can use "\df+ functionname"; you could also issue a
> query like

> SELECT prosrc FROM pg_proc WHERE proname = 'functionname';

Also, I think that several of the available GUI packages (pgAdmin
etc) provide more comfortable means of editing function definitions.

            regards, tom lane