Re: order function in aggregate

[Mike Toews <mwtoews(at)sfu(dot)ca>]

Richard Huxton wrote:
> Michael Toews wrote:
>
> You could accumulate the values in an array and then sort that with 
> the final-func that create aggregate supports.

Thanks for the help. Here was my final functions to aggregate things 
into a comma serpented text element (if anyone is interested):

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION commacat_fn(anyarray)
 RETURNS text AS
$BODY$select array_to_string(sort($1),', ');$BODY$
 LANGUAGE 'sql' IMMUTABLE STRICT
 COST 100;
ALTER FUNCTION commacat_fn(anyarray) OWNER TO postgres;

CREATE AGGREGATE commacat(anyelement) (
 SFUNC=array_append,
 STYPE=anyarray,
 FINALFUNC=commacat_fn,
 INITCOND='{}'
);

---------------

Lastly a random quick example:

select attrelid, commacat(attname) as attnames from pg_attribute group 
by attrelid order by attrelid;

Certainly there are far better examples that can be used to distill 
information in a table to a comma-separated list.

In some specific applications, a "sort(myarraytype[])" function will 
need to be created if the data type in the aggregate column does not 
have a sort function (fortunately, most data types already have this 
function defined).

Regards,
+mt