Re: "Dynamic" object

[Simon Wright <simon@pogner.demon.co.uk>]

randhol@pvv.org (Preben Randhol) writes:

> Ok think about it more in the way of making a GUI interface to
> PostgreSQL where you can set up the fields as you like in your
> database.
> 
> So you can make one database which is an address book containing
> only the fields Name and Address or you can make a database to
> organize the books that you own, etc...
> 
> So the program cannot statically (at compile-time) know which fields
> are present in the database you want to open.

Ada doesn't really offer you any more facilities for doing this than
C would. How would you do it in C? (or perl, come to that?)

* interface to the DBMS to determine the record(s) involved, the
  fields, the type/size of each field

* construct some GUI to display these fields

* construct & execute query, populate GUI

You'll probably end up making a binding from Ada to PostGres, with
things in it like dbms_table_description which could contain a
table_name and an unconstrained array of dbms_field which would
contain a field_name & a type_name .. is there a binding already?
ODBC?