[Sqlrelay-discussion] getColumnType returns 'UNKNOWN' for PostgreSQL ARRAY column type.

[Alfred J F. <alf...@gm...>]

Hi everyone,

    I am using SQLRelay 0.38 via Python (2.4.4) to connect to a PostgreSQL (
8.1.9) database.  I have noticed that if I create a table with an ARRAY
column, that Sqlrelay returns the column type as UNKNOWN.  E.g., if I issue
the following SQL:

CREATE TABLE test (arr TEXT[][]);

And fill it will some test data:

INSERT INTO test (arr) VALUES (ARRAY[['fname', 'alfred'], ['lname',
'fazio'], ['age', '24'], ['employer', 'smoothstone']]);

I will get an UNKNOWN value when calling getColumnType on the arr column
above:

>>> c.sendQuery("SELECT arr FROM test")
>>> c.getField(0, 0)
'{{fname,alfred},{lname,fazio},{age,24},{employer,smoothstone}}'
>>> c.getColumnType(0)
'UNKNOWN'

It would be very convenient if I could test whether the column I am fetching
is an ARRAY.  If so, I can automatically parse the result of the query into
a native Python list.  I briefly peeked in the source code and saw that
there has been a datatype declared for arrays for PostgreSQL in the
src/common/datatypes.h file (called 'ANYARRAY').  However, I didn't look
around for long to see where I might implement the code needed to detect the
column type.  Could somebody please point me to the right direction within
the source code where I can perhaps add a clause for this situation?  I will
then be happy to submit a patch to the list.

Thanks for your time!

-- 
Alfred J Fazio,
alf...@gm...