Are there other ways to select a dynamic list of columns?

Question

I need to let my users specify the list of columns they want to select. So far I know two ways of accomplishing that.

1. Using refcursors

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION selecttestwithcolumnlist(
ticker character varying, 
columnlist character varying)
  RETURNS refcursor AS
$BODY$
DECLARE 
  ref1 refcursor;
BEGIN

OPEN ref1 FOR EXECUTE 
'select ' || ColumnList || ' from Prices WHERE Ticker=$1;'
USING     Ticker;
RETURN ref1;

END;
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE plpgsql VOLATILE

This function is very easy to invoke from my Ado.Net client. All I need to do is pass the parameters. However, if I want to test this function from pgAdmin, the result set is open on screen only if I keep my transaction open. This is inconvenient. Of course, it is easy to expose the data as an HTML table or an Excel spreadsheet, but this is kind of a minor inconvenience.

2. Using setof records

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION SelectPrices(colList VARCHAR)
 RETURNS SETOF record AS
$func$
BEGIN

RETURN QUERY EXECUTE
'SELECT ' || colList || ' FROM prices ORDER BY Ticker, ASOfDate';

END
$func$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Unfortunately, this complicates my client code. I cannot issue a simple SELECT like this:

SELECT price,AsOfdate,ticker FROM SelectPrices('price,AsOfdate,ticker') ;

I must explicitly provide the structure of my result set:

SELECT price,AsOfdate,ticker FROM SelectPrices('price,AsOfdate,ticker') 
AS f(price NUMERIC,AsOfdate TIMESTAMP,ticker VARCHAR);

This is doable, but inconvenient.

Are there other ways to return dynamic column lists?

Edit to protect against SQL injection, I typically split the comma-separated list and join it against a system view. Anything that is not an actual column name is not returned. I did not mention that originally, just to keep the question short.