Question

I’m writing a function in node.js to query a PostgreSQL table.
If the row exists, I want to return the id column from the row.
If it doesn’t exist, I want to insert it and return the id (insert into ... returning id).

I’ve been trying variations of case and if else statements and can’t seem to get it to work.

Answer 1

I would suggest doing the checking on the database side and just returning the id to nodejs.

Example:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION foo(p_param1 tableFoo.attr1%TYPE, p_param2 tableFoo.attr1%TYPE) RETURNS tableFoo.id%TYPE AS $$
  DECLARE
  v_id tableFoo.pk%TYPE;
  BEGIN
    SELECT id
    INTO v_id
    FROM tableFoo
    WHERE attr1 = p_param1
    AND attr2 = p_param2;

    IF v_id IS NULL THEN
      INSERT INTO tableFoo(id, attr1, attr2) VALUES (DEFAULT, p_param1, p_param2)
      RETURNING id INTO v_id;
    END IF;

    RETURN v_id:

  END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

And than on the Node.js-side (i’m using node-postgres in this example):

var pg = require('pg');
pg.connect('someConnectionString', function(connErr, client){

  //do some errorchecking here

  client.query('SELECT id FROM foo($1, $2);', ['foo', 'bar'], function(queryErr, result){

    //errorchecking

    var id = result.rows[0].id;      

  };

});