How to create a column that holds an array in Postgres? - postgresql

Question

Background:
I am making a db for a reservartions calendar. The reservations are hourly based, so I need to insert many items to one column called "hours_reserved".
Example tables of what I need:
Table "Space"
Column / Values
id / 1
date / 5.2.2020
hours / { 8-10, 10-12 }
Table "reservation"
Column / Values
id / 1
space_id / 1
date / 5.2.2020
reserved_hours / 8-10
Table "reservation"
Column / Values
id / 2
space_id / 1
date / 5.2.2020
hours / 10-12
So I need to have multiple items inserted into "space" table "hours" column.
How do I do this in Postgres?
Also is there a better way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

There is more way to do this, depending on the type of the hours field (i.e. text[], json or jsonb) I'd go with jsonb just because you can do a lot of things with it and you'll find this experience to be useful in the short term.
CREATE TABLE "public"."space"
("id" SERIAL, "date_schedule" date, "hours" jsonb, PRIMARY KEY ("id"))
Whenever you insert a record in this table that's manually crafted, write it as text (single quoted json object) and cast it to jsonb
insert into "space"
(date_schedule,hours)
values
('05-02-2020'::date, '["8-10", "10-12"]'::jsonb);
There is more than one way to match these available hours against the reservations and you can take a look at the docs, on the json and jsonb operations. For example, doing:
SELECT id,date_schedule, jsonb_array_elements(hours) hours FROM "public"."space"
would yield
Which has these ugly double quotes (which is correct, since json can hold several kinds of scalars, that column is polimorfic :D)
However, you can perform a little transformation to remove them and be able to perform a join with reservations
with unnested as (
SELECT id,date_schedule, jsonb_array_elements(hours) hours FROM "public"."space"
)
select id,date_schedule,replace(hours::text, '"','') from unnested
The same can be achieved defining the field as text[] (the insertion syntax is different but trivial)
in that scenario your data will look like:
Which you can unwrap as:
SELECT id,date_schedule, unnest(hours) FROM "public"."space"

Answer 2

Apparently
ALTER TABLE mytable
ADD COLUMN myarray text[];
Works fine.
I got a following problem when trying to put(update) into that column using postman(create works fine):
{
"myarray": ["8-10"]
}
Results into:
"message": "error: invalid input syntax for type integer:
\"{\"myarray\":[\"8-10\"]}\""