Returning a column with node-mysql (like fetchColumn in PDO)

Question

Is there any way to return a single column with node-mysql? I'm looking for something analogous to fetchColumn in PDO.

For example, say I have the following query:

database.query("SELECT id FROM user", function(error, row) {
  console.log(row);
});

This would result in:

[{id: 1}, {id: 2}, {id: 3}, ...]

Instead, I would like:

[1, 2, 3, ...]

I can run a loop to extract the data, which is what I've been doing, but I find this coming up time and again so I'm wondering if there is a simple solution.

Answer 1

You could probably add your own function to the database class in an elegant way, but since Javascript has functional support, a non intrusive way would be to just wrap your function receiving the results in a wrapper function that removes the key;

single_value = function(fn) {
  return function(e,r) {
    for(var k in r)
      break;
    return fn(e, k === undefined ? undefined : r[k]);
  }
}

That way, you can call the normal query function as;

database.query("SELECT id FROM user", single_value(function(error, row) {
  console.log(row);
}));

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