pgx-named-columns

The pgx Rust crate (github · crates · docs) is a really nice library to develop PostgreSQL extensions in Rust. Given the following Rust code:

```rust const ALPHABET: &str = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

[pg_extern]

fn alphabet(length: i8) -> impl Iterator

...you can use the alphabet function inside your database.

sql select alphabet(8);

Note how the column names are defined in Rust, line 3 and 4, using an inert declarative macro. There is currently no other way to define them. This is a problem for 2 reasons : * Column names cannot easily be reused accross two different function that are expected to return the same value. i.e. you can't easily create an alphabet_reverse function that returns the exact same columns without copy-pasting code. This become a big problem when you don't have 2, but 50 columns. * It isn't clear at first glance which value of the returned tuples corresponds to which column name. If your tuple contains a lot of columns of the same type, it's incredibly easy to mix them up.

These problems could easily be solved by using a struct as the impl Iterator's item, but due to the way procedural macros work, they cannot access type-level information when they run. The only proper way to solve this would be a complete redesign of pgx, which I cannot do. I opened pgx/issues#451.

Hence, the creation of this library : using filthy procedural macro hacks, including having the macro open a Rust file twice to read data outside the item it is applied to, it makes it possible to use a structure as returned rows. There are millions of way this can fail due to how badly implemented it is, but it should work for the general use-case. Here's how it looks :

```rust const ALPHABET: &str = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

struct IndexedLetter { idx: i8, letter: char, }

[pgexterncolumns("path/to/current/file.rs")]

fn alphabet(length: i8) -> impl Iterator { ALPHABET .chars() .take(length.clamp(0, 25) as usize) .enumerate() .map(|(idx, letter)| IndexedLetter { idx: idx as _, letter, }) } ```

The path in the attribute parameters is probably the ugliest aspect of the macro, it is used to find the definition of IndexedLetter.