Hi all
I'm currently migrating a legacy Informix 4gl application to run on PostgreSQL 
(v9.5.8)

There are errors occurring because sometimes the application tries to 
insert/update values longer than the definition of the database column.
The error message is eg. "value too long for type character(20)".

The behaviour under Informix is to silently truncate the saved value, but with 
PostgreSQL it crashes our application program. Obviously the short answer is to 
modify the application so that it does not attempt to save values that are too 
long, but with 1000+ programs and approx. 8000 insert/update statements to 
review this will take a lot of time.

I was hoping to emulate the Informix behaviour by creating triggers to run 
before each insert/update that would check the length of the values being saved 
and truncate if too long. However I'm still getting the error messages. 
Presumably the length validation is being done before the trigger is run. Is 
there some way this could be changed so the trigger happens first?

I've seen examples that involve changing the char type columns to text, but 
this changes the semantics of string comparisons with regard to trailing 
spaces, and I'm concerned that this might cause subtle and hard to find 
problems within the application.

Thanks
Kevin


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