Creating triggers

You create triggers using either Sybase Central or Interactive SQL. In Sybase Central, you can use a wizard to provide necessary information. In Interactive SQL, you can use a CREATE TRIGGER statement. For both tools, you must have DBA or RESOURCE authority to create a trigger and you must have ALTER permissions on the table associated with the trigger.

The body of a trigger consists of a compound statement: a set of semicolon-delimited SQL statements bracketed by a BEGIN and an END statement.

You cannot use COMMIT and ROLLBACK and some ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT statements within a trigger.

To create a trigger for a given table (Sybase Central)

Connect to the database as a user with DBA or Resource authority.
In the left pane, click Triggers.
Choose File » New » Trigger.
Follow the instructions in the Create Trigger Wizard.
To complete the code, in the right pane click the SQL tab.

To create a trigger for a given table (SQL)

Connect to a database as a user with DBA authority. You must also have ALTER permissions on the table associated with the trigger.
Execute a CREATE TRIGGER statement.

Example 1: A row-level INSERT trigger

The following trigger is an example of a row-level INSERT trigger. It checks that the birth date entered for a new employee is reasonable:

CREATE TRIGGER check_birth_date
   AFTER INSERT ON Employees
REFERENCING NEW AS new_employee
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
     DECLARE err_user_error EXCEPTION
   FOR SQLSTATE '99999';
   IF new_employee.BirthDate > 'June 6, 2001' THEN
          SIGNAL err_user_error;
   END IF;
END;

Note

You may already have a trigger with the name check_birth_date in your SQL Anywhere sample database. If so, and you attempt to run the above SQL statement, an error is returned indicating that the trigger definition conflicts with existing triggers.

This trigger fires after any row is inserted into the Employees table. It detects and disallows any new rows that correspond to birth dates later than June 6, 2001.

The phrase REFERENCING NEW AS new_employee allows statements in the trigger code to refer to the data in the new row using the alias new_employee.

Signaling an error causes the triggering statement, and any previous trigger effects, to be undone.

For an INSERT statement that adds many rows to the Employees table, the check_birth_date trigger fires once for each new row. If the trigger fails for any of the rows, all effects of the INSERT statement roll back.

You can specify that the trigger fires before the row is inserted, rather than after, by changing the second line of the example to say :

BEFORE INSERT ON Employees

The REFERENCING NEW clause refers to the inserted values of the row; it is independent of the timing (BEFORE or AFTER) of the trigger.

You may find it easier in some cases to enforce constraints using declarative referential integrity or CHECK constraints, rather than triggers. For example, implementing the above example with a column check constraint proves more efficient and concise:

CHECK (@col <= 'June 6, 2001')

Example 2: A row-level DELETE trigger example

The following CREATE TRIGGER statement defines a row-level DELETE trigger:

CREATE TRIGGER mytrigger 
BEFORE DELETE ON Employees
REFERENCING OLD AS oldtable
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
   ...
END;

The REFERENCING OLD clause is independent of the timing (BEFORE or AFTER) of the trigger, and enables the delete trigger code to refer to the values in the row being deleted using the alias oldtable.

Example 3: A statement-level UPDATE trigger example

The following CREATE TRIGGER statement is appropriate for statement-level UPDATE triggers:

CREATE TRIGGER mytrigger AFTER UPDATE ON Employees
REFERENCING NEW AS table_after_update
            OLD AS table_before_update
FOR EACH STATEMENT
BEGIN
   ...
END;

The REFERENCING NEW and REFERENCING OLD clause allows the UPDATE trigger code to refer to both the old and new values of the rows being updated. The table alias table_after_update refers to columns in the new row and the table alias table_before_update refers to columns in the old row.

The REFERENCING NEW and REFERENCING OLD clause has a slightly different meaning for statement-level and row-level triggers. For statement-level triggers the REFERENCING OLD or NEW aliases are table aliases, while in row-level triggers they refer to the row being altered.