[pgrouting-dev] "Status" return type

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 5/20/2013 11:58 PM, Daniel Kastl wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Trying to get the documentation structured I felt that it was a good
> idea to unify our custom types:
> http://docs.pgrouting.org/dev/src/common/doc/types.html
>
> But there are functions that only return a status and I'm not so happy
> with examples like:
>
> SELECT  *  FROM  pgr_nodeNetwork('edge_table',  'id',  'the_geom',  'edge_table_noded',  0.000001);
>
>                 pgr_nodenetwork
> ----------------------------------------------
>   edge_table_noded  generated  with:  16  segments
> (1  row)
>
> SELECT  pgr_createTopology('edge_table',  0.000001,  'the_geom',  'id');
>
>   pgr_createtopology
> --------------------
>   OK
> (1  row)
>
>
> What about some "pgr_statusResult", which could contain a status code
> for example and a status message?
>
> CREATE  TYPE  pgr_statusResult  AS
> (
>      code  float8,
>      message  text
> );

Daniel,

99.9% of the time we have an error we would never get control to return 
a record like this without a LOT of code changes.

The only time we this type of response is a procedure that does some 
kind of potentially long running batch operation and the response is 
more to inform the user we are done.

I know we are trying to standardize things but I can not see any vlaue 
for doing this given that most of the time we would not return error 
codes because plpgsql does not support returning a complex error status 
so we would have to code around doing that and we probably have better 
things to focus on.

I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise if there are good arguments for 
doing this.

I do understand the lack of standardization in these messages. Maybe we 
can return more useful messages.

-Steve