Thanks Andreas,

I am making some progress on this now. I have worked out the constituent
logic - and which unctions to use (thanks to your feedback). The
remaining challenge is how to put it all together into valid SQL.

Here is the logic I have so far:


I think I can seperate the field values of (rows) by commas and then
separate the rows themselves using semicolumns, so that an example book
details argument could look like this:

"1,'Romeo & Juliet', 'W. Shakespeare'; 2, 'The Art of War', 'Sun Tzu";
3, 'War & Peace', 'Leo Tolstoy"

So I can first parse the string into string array (i.e. 3 rows), by
splitting on ';' then I iterate through each string (row), get the
values for each field, build a string and then execute an INSERT INTO
statement, using the value extracted from the row.

Having got this far, the problems then are:

1). How to create an 'INSERT INTO statement from each of the rows
(declare a string variable in SQL?)?
2). How to execute the 'INSERT INTO' statement from my function?
3). How to know if the INSERT failed?
4). How to ROLLBACK if an error occured in ANY of the row inserts?

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

begin Ronald Raygun schrieb:
You can do that, and EXECUTE the string:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...-EXECUTING-DYN

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/i...TS-DIAGNOSTICS


You can try to COMMIT after the function, if there was an error a
ROLLBACK performed instead.


end
Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Linux - weil ich es mir wert bin!
GnuPG-ID 0x3FFF606C http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net