Postgres- update a value in a array on particular index

Question

I have a column named ids that is of type bigint[]. ids cane be null or of any length

It has values based on certain hierarchy.

My use case is I want to update value that is at a particular index. For example ids[2] = 50.

How can I achieve this?

I looked at this https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-array.html#ARRAY-FUNCTIONS-TABLE but couldn't find anything that could help.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Indeed there is no such function, but you can easily write your own:

create function array_set(p_input anyarray, p_index int, p_new_value anyelement)
  returns anyarray
as
$$
begin
  if p_input is not null then
    p_input[p_index] := p_new_value;
  end if;
  return p_input;
end;
$$
language plpgsql
immutable;

(If you never need it for anything different than bigint[] then you can replace the anyelement and anyarray with the equivalent types)

Then you can use it like this:

update the_table
  set ids = array_set(ids, 2, 50::bigint)
where ...;

Answer 2

You need to use unnest to make a table from the array and array_agg to aggregate it back into an array.

To replace the third element in an array of integer with 42, you could for example use

SELECT array_agg(
          CASE WHEN num = 3
               THEN 42
               ELSE elem
          END
          ORDER BY num
       )
FROM unnest('{1,2,4,5}'::int[]) WITH ORDINALITY AS a(elem, num);

 array_agg  
------------
 {1,2,42,5}
(1 row)

You could write your own function based on that.

WITH ORDINALITY tracks the ordering of the array elements, so that you can identify the currect one, and ORDER BY makes sure that the final aggregate constructs the array in the same order.

Answer 3

create temporary table the_table (
    ids bigint[]
);

insert into the_table (ids) values
    (null),
    (array[1, 2]),
    (array[1, 2, 3]);

update the_table
set ids[2] = 50
where 
  ids is not null and
  array_upper(ids, 1) >= 2;
  
select * from the_table;

Source: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/arrays.html#ARRAYS-MODIFYING