How to concatenate strings of a string field in a PostgreSQL 'group by' query?

Question

I am looking for a way to concatenate the strings of a field within a group by query. So for example, I have a table:

ID   COMPANY_ID   EMPLOYEE
1    1               


        

Answer 1

As already mentioned, creating your own aggregate function is the right thing to do. Here is my concatenation aggregate function (you can find details in French):

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION concat2(text, text) RETURNS text AS '
    SELECT CASE WHEN $1 IS NULL OR $1 = \'\' THEN $2
            WHEN $2 IS NULL OR $2 = \'\' THEN $1
            ELSE $1 || \' / \' || $2
            END; 
'
 LANGUAGE SQL;

CREATE AGGREGATE concatenate (
  sfunc = concat2,
  basetype = text,
  stype = text,
  initcond = ''

);

And then use it as:

SELECT company_id, concatenate(employee) AS employees FROM ...