How to get PostGIS DB name from QGIS layer?

Question

I'm writing a custom Processing script that needs to know which database connection a vector layer resides in. I can't find anywhere in the API a function to return this information from a layer. So I guess I have two questions:

1. Is there a Python function (either from qgis.core or from Processing tools) that easily returns things like the DB name, schema, etc. of a given layer?
2. If not, do I need to parse the URI of the layer? How do I get that information?

Answer 1

I ended up writing a small module to extract information out of the string that source() returns:

import re

class LayerDbInfo:
    def __init__(self, layerInfo):
        if layerInfo[:6] == 'dbname':
            layerInfo = layerInfo.replace('\'','"')
            vals = dict(re.findall('(\S+)="?(.*?)"? ',layerInfo))
            self.dbName = str(vals['dbname'])
            self.key = str(vals['key'])
            self.user = str(vals['user'])
            self.password = str(vals['password'])
            self.srid = int(vals['srid'])
            self.type = str(vals['type'])
            self.host = str(vals['host'])
            self.port = int(vals['port'])

            # need some extra processing to get table name and schema
            table = vals['table'].split('.')
            self.schemaName = table[0].strip('"')
            self.tableName = table[1].strip('"')
        else:
            raise

    def getDBName(self):
        return self.dbName

    def getHost(self):
        return self.host

    def getPort(self):
        return self.port

    def getKey(self):
        return self.key

    def getUser(self):
        return self.user

    def getPassword(self):
        return self.password

    def getSRID(self):
        return self.srid

    def getType(self):
        return self.type

    def getSchema(self):
        return self.schemaName

    def getTable(self):
        return self.tableName

Answer 2

I think you could use the following code to obtain source information for your layer. Select a layer from the layer window and input the code into the Python Console:

layer = qgis.utils.iface.activeLayer()
print layer.source()

You should receive information about the layer.

Hope this helps!