Postgres - update statement as a trigger - postgresql

I've been playing around for the last hour or more trying to put an update statement into a trigger. I understand the concept of an UPDATE statement and the below works just fine
UPDATE cars SET country = 'France';
What I want is to put this into a trigger so that when the cars table is updated, the column country will automatically be updated with France.
I've played around with adapting Functions and Triggers that I've found out on the interweb but I'm obviously making the statement wrong as either they don't execute or they execute but don't update the country field when a new record is added.
CREATE FUNCTION update_country () RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$
BEGIN
IF (TG_OP = 'UPDATE') THEN
UPDATE cars SET country = 'France' WHERE id = New.id;
END IF;
RETURN NULL;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql; --The trigger used to update a table.
CREATE TRIGGER update_country_col BEFORE UPDATE ON cars FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE update_country();
The above scripts executes but does not add France to the country column.
The function was adapted from a statement that I found out on the web.
Postgres 9.1.
I know that the answer is going to be so simple!

In update triggers you should modify NEW record.
Also, you may need to return NEW record from procedure.
So, you should use following procedure instead of yours:
CREATE FUNCTION update_country () RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$
BEGIN
IF (TG_OP = 'UPDATE') THEN
NEW.country = 'France';
END IF;
RETURN NEW;
END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Related

SELECT in cascaded AFTER DELETE trigger returning stale data in Postgres 11

I have an AFTER INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE trigger function which runs after any change to table campaigns and triggers an update on table contracts:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_campaign_target() RETURNS trigger AS $update_campaign_target$
BEGIN
UPDATE contracts SET updated_at = now() WHERE contracts.contract_id = NEW.contract_id;
END;
$update_campaign_target$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS update_campaign_target ON campaigns;
CREATE TRIGGER update_campaign_target AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON campaigns
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE update_campaign_target();
I have another trigger on table contracts that runs BEFORE UPDATE. The goal is to generate a computed column target which displays either contracts.manual_target (if set) or SUM(campaigns.target) WHERE campaign.contract_id = NEW.contract_id.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_contract_manual_target() RETURNS trigger AS $update_contract_manual_target$
DECLARE
campaign_target_count int;
BEGIN
IF NEW.manual_target IS NOT NULL
THEN
NEW.target := NEW.manual_target;
RETURN NEW;
ELSE
SELECT SUM(campaigns.target) INTO campaign_target_count
FROM campaigns
WHERE campaigns.contract_id = NEW.contract_id;
NEW.target := campaign_target_count;
RETURN NEW;
END IF;
END;
$update_contract_manual_target$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS update_contract_manual_target ON contracts;
CREATE TRIGGER update_contract_manual_target BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE ON contracts
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE update_contract_manual_target();
This works as expected on INSERT and UPDATE on campaigns, but does not work on DELETE. When a campaign is deleted, the result of SUM(campaigns.target) in the second trigger includes the deleted campaign's target, and thus does not update the contracts.target column to the expected value. A second update of contracts will correctly set the value.
Three questions:
Why doesn't this work?
Is there a way to achieve the behavior I'm looking for using triggers?
For this type of data synchronization, is it better to achieve this using triggers or views? Triggers make sense to me because this is a table that we will read many magnitudes of times more than we'll write to it, but I'm not sure what the best practices are.
The reason this doesn't work is the usage of NEW.contract_id in the AFTER DELETE trigger:
UPDATE contracts SET updated_at = now() WHERE contracts.contract_id = NEW.contract_id;
Per the Triggers on Data Changes documentation, NEW is NULL for DELETE triggers.
Updating the code to use OLD instead of NEW fixes the issue:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_campaign_target() RETURNS trigger AS $update_campaign_target$
BEGIN
IF TG_OP = 'DELETE'
THEN
UPDATE contracts SET updated_at = now() WHERE contracts.contract_id = OLD.contract_id;
ELSE
UPDATE contracts SET updated_at = now() WHERE contracts.contract_id = NEW.contract_id;
END IF;
RETURN NULL;
END;
$update_campaign_target$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
Thanks to Anthony Sotolongo and Belayer for your help!

Postgresql: create trigger to increment count_column between two tables?

I have a table called car and another table called inventory.
car has a column called needs_oil_change (bool)
inventory has a column called oil_change_due_count INTEGER
I want to create a trigger that will incremented or decrement the inventory.oil_change_due_count whenever a car.oil_change_due_count is changed (or whenever a new car record is inserted, or deleted).
So, in short, I want a trigger to keep the inventory summary count column oil_change_due_count synchronized as car records are created/deleted/updated.
I've tried to follow some docs online like these:
https://w3resource.com/PostgreSQL/postgresql-triggers.php
https://dataegret.com/2017/10/postgresqls-transition-relations/
and others.
I haven't been able to create one that works yet.
How would I write a trigger that could handle that logic?
I just found this:
PostgreSQL: Checking for NEW and OLD in a function for a trigger
not sure if it will answer my question, but I will try to learn from that and see if I can apply to my question.
First of all you need to create a trigger function to handle the logic, in postgresql you can do something like this
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION fn_oil_change() RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$
BEGIN
IF (TG_OP = 'DELETE') THEN
UPDATE inventory SET oil_change_due_count = oil_change_due_count - OLD.oil_change_due_count;
RETURN OLD;
ELSIF (TG_OP = 'UPDATE') THEN
... some logic to hangle update
RETURN NEW
ELSIF (TG_OP = 'INSERT') THEN
... some logic to hangle update
RETURN NEW;
END IF;
RETURN NULL; -- result is ignored since this is an AFTER trigger
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
and then create the trigger itself
CREATE TRIGGER tg_oil_change
AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON car
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE fn_oil_change();
Something more or less like this, right now I can't test the code, and you'll need to think how to handle the update.

A trigger that detects that an UPDATE wouldn't change a row

I wrote the following trigger:
CREATE FUNCTION trig_func() RETURNS trigger AS $$
BEGIN
IF NEW = OLD
THEN -- update would do nothing, doing something...
END IF;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
CREATE TRIGGER trig BEFORE UPDATE ON some_table
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE trig_func();
It makes it clear what I'd like to achieve, but what is the proper thing to put in place of NEW = OLD?
The is distinct from operator can compare complete rows and will handle nulls correctly.
So you want
if new is not distinct from old then
...
end if;

PostgreSQL: Checking for NEW and OLD in a function for a trigger

I want to create a trigger which counts rows and updates a field in an other table. My current solution works for INSERT statements but failes when I DELETE a row.
My current function:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_table_count()
RETURNS trigger AS
$$
DECLARE updatecount INT;
BEGIN
Select count(*) into updatecount
From source_table
Where id = new.id;
Update dest_table set count=updatecount
Where id = new.id;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$$
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';
The trigger is a pretty basic one, looking like.
CREATE TRIGGER count_trigger
AFTER INSERT OR DELETE
ON source_table
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE update_table_count();
When I excute a DELETE statement the following error occurs:
ERROR: record "new" is not assigned yet
DETAIL: The tuple structure of a not-yet-assigned record is indeterminate.
I know one solution could be to create just one set of trigger and function for the DELETE and one for the INSERT statement. But I want to do it a bit more elegant and want to know, if there is a solution to check if NEW or OLD is present in the current context and just implement an IF ELSE block. But I dont know how to check for this context sensitive items.
Thanks for your help
The usual approach to make a trigger function do different things depending on how the trigger was fired is to check the trigger operation through TG_OP
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_table_count()
RETURNS trigger AS
$$
DECLARE
updatecount INT;
BEGIN
if tg_op = 'UPDATE' then
select count(*) into updatecount from source_table where id = new.id;
update dest_table set count=updatecount where id = new.id;
elsif tg_op = 'DELETE' then
... do something else
end if;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;
Unrelated, but: the language name is an identifier. Do not quote it using single quotes.
From PostgreSQL's documentation:
NEW
Data type RECORD; variable holding the new database row for INSERT/UPDATE operations in row-level triggers. This variable is null in statement-level triggers and for DELETE operations.
OLD
Data type RECORD; variable holding the old database row for UPDATE/DELETE operations in row-level triggers. This variable is null in statement-level triggers and for INSERT operations.
So, for example, if NEW is NULL, then the trigger was invoked on DELETE.

Trigger update another table

I have been trying to write a trigger function that updates the rows in the child table when the parent is changed for a while now.
I have read Trigger procedure documentation but i have not really grasped how to build the functions.
This is what I have tried that does not work...
CREATE FUNCTION myschema.update_child() RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
UPDATE myschema.child
set new.number = parent.number
FROM myschema.parent
WHERE id = "id";
RETURN NEW;
END
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql
Then the trigger
CREATE TRIGGER update_child_after_update
AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE
ON myschema.child
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE myschema.update_child();
Does anyone have some tips to give?
Best regards
You don't need to use the parent table in the body of the trigger function, because the values from the parent table are available in the function in the special variable OLD and NEW. In this case you only need NEW.
If you need the trigger only on update, than define a update-only trigger:
CREATE or replace FUNCTION update_child() RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
UPDATE child
set number = NEW.number
WHERE id = NEW.id;
RETURN NEW;
END
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;
CREATE TRIGGER update_child_after_update
AFTER UPDATE
ON parent
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE update_child();