select statement in postgres function called inside a trigger - postgresql

Question

I'm trying to develop a notification system for the backend of a social media application/website. For now I'm focusing on status updates. What I'm going to do, is putting a trigger on the postgres table that related to status updates so that every time a new status update is posted, a notification is sent to my code.
So far I have been able to do that. But an extra feature that I like to implement is extracting all of the people who follow the user who posted the status update, so that I can also send them a notification that the person they're following has posted a new status update.
Of course it can be implemented by first receiving the notification for a new status update from postgres, extracting the user id of the person who posted it, and make a query to the database to find out which users follow them.
But I figured it would be more efficient if I don't make the query, and instead, each time postgres wants to send me a notification about a new status update, it also makes a query to find out which users are following the poster of the status update and send that information along with the notification for the new status update.
But I can't figure out how I can make a query in a postgres function that depends on the argument of that function, and then send the result of that query along with the argument as a notification.
this is what I've tried:
create table example (c1 text, c2 text);
create function notif()
returns trigger as
$$
begin
perform pg_notify('event',row_to_json(new)::text);
return new;
end;
$$ language plpgsql;
create trigger trig after insert
on example
for each row execute procedure notif();
And then I listen to the event channel from my code and receive the row that was inserted. But I want to do a select statement based on the new row in my notif() function and send the result with the new row to the listening code.
I'd appreciate any clarification
Thanks

Answer 1

Something like this?
CREATE FUNCTION notif()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$
DECLARE
data JSONB;
result JSONB;
BEGIN
SELECT json_agg(tmp) -- requires Postgres9.3+
INTO data
FROM (
-- your subquery goes here, for example:
SELECT followers.following_user_id
FROM followers
WHERE followers.followed_user_id = NEW.user_id
) tmp;
result := json_build_object('data', data, 'row', row_to_json(NEW));
PERFORM pg_notify('event', result::TEXT);
RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ language plpgsql;
Also from comments:
But somehow magically using return new the row is returned within the notification.
You misunderstand things. Return and notification are two different things.
First of all lets deal with return. For AFTER INSERT triggers the return value is totally ignored:
The return value of a row-level trigger fired AFTER or a statement-level trigger fired BEFORE or AFTER is always ignored; it might as well be null.
The return value only matters for BEFORE triggers. In which case you can modify (or even prevent) the row before writing to the table. See this: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/plpgsql-trigger.html This has nothing to do with notifications.
So what about notifications? Whatever you receive from a notification is what you pass as second argument to pg_notify. All of that is quite well documented: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/sql-notify.html